A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

The most violent act James Cook could think of was to take a ship through water.
It sounded like nothing, a door opening and then closing. Yet even water has a
memory, as does skin. The bow of a boat cutting through a wave, a hand running
across a thigh. […] Anyone would play God, given the opportunity (101-3).
Ivan’s insincerity is exposed when he takes a piece of hardened lava rock from the park,
an invitation for bad luck:
Even up in Volcano, the mist was shark-colored, […] He said some of his best
memories were of us, sitting right here looking out at Kilauea. As he spoke, the
mist covered the view again and the air around us became wet and heavy. […] I
didn’t trust him. A man who stole lava, who deliberately took that kind of risk,
was asking for his life to be changed for him, rather than changing it himself. I felt
something new towards Ivan, and it was disappointment (169-70). 594
The eruption of Kilauea, Pele’s anger, precedes Kinau’s anger and her termination of her
affair with her ex-husband. When in the end she goes to see where the lava is flowing into
the sea, she knows that she has always been living on precarious ground, vulnerable, on
the edge:
All I was standing on was a thin crust, while everywhere beneath me, the molten
lava was flowing faster than I could run, rushing towards the coast. […] I thought
how passion is like a leaping fish, all the wet colors flashing in the sun. We don’t
give a thought to the larger fish that is chasing it, forcing that beautiful leap. […]
Until then, where we need to be is underwater, with one eye on the beast that
keeps us moving (192).
It is the flooding of an otherwise mundane story with a host of ocean-related images that
turns Lava into a Localized meditation on life, love, and death, on finality and endurance.
In Ian MacMillan’s fiction, the ocean also is a presence to be reckoned with.
Alternately soothing and dangerous, it borders on being a character, bearing life and
594 One can infer that her dead mother, linked to the volcano goddess Pele by her flashes of anger and her
rightful place close to Kilauea crater (“I realized that I’d spread her ashes in the wrong place. It should have
been up the mountain in Volcano, where her ashes could have blown over the thick ferns, up into the ‘ohi’a
trees like mist, like smoke, like a mother,” 146), is the one who has finally revealed Ivan’s true nature. As
for the ‘bad luck’ or ‘Pele’s curse’ that is allegedly attached to the rocks taken away from Kilauea crater,
there are conflicting statements regarding the authenticity of such a belief. Several Local people told me
that you are not supposed to take rocks or any other material from Pele’s ‘abode,’ while I also heard that
park rangers from the Volcanoes National Park had invented the story of bad luck in the 1940s, intending to
keep visitors from razing the area for souvenirs.
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