text: "Typee" is based on Melville's experiences when, as a young man of 22, he "jumped ship" from an American whaling vessel on the island of Nukuheva in the Marquesas Islands of the South Pacific.  It is written in a straightforward narrative manner, but it is a work of fiction, NOT a journalistic report, something that is often overlooked.  While, like "Moby Dick", it contains lots of factual details, mostly quite accurate as confirmed by subsequent research, it is a much more complex tale than it appears to be on the surface.
  
  For a first novel, written when Melville was only 27 years old, the narrative power is quite impressive, as for example in his description of the escape from the ship over the mountains to the Valley of the Typee.  In the early chapters, themes of peace, beauty, and sensuality are combined with Melville's righteous indignation at the activities of Western military and religious intruders to create the illusion of an earthly paradise.  Gradually dread, loneliness, horror, and fear of annihilation come to the fore, as "Tommo", the protagonist, becomes convinced that he is being kept for eventual eating at a ritual cannibal feast.  He is finally rescued almost by chance, and because of conflict among the Typees.
  
  I read the Oxford World's Classics paperback edition, which has an introduction by Ruth Blair, an Australian professor of English.  It was very helpful with Melville's historical and literary sources and the geographical and cultural context.  The chapter on "Typee" in "Studies in Classic American Literature" by D.H. Lawrence adds a further depth of understanding.  Newton Arvin's biography of Melville helps to place "Typee" in the development of Melville as a writer.
  
  Highly recommended in its own right as a superb example of 19th century American romanticism, with hints of the impending metaphysical explosion of "Moby Dick"
  