Playing with Water by James Hamilton-Paterson

Playing with Water Reviews

• 
  Martin

  Alone on a Philippine island. Descriptions of the people and the landscape by the author in an autobiographical style
  
  
  
  A gift of pure water for the community
  
  
  
  
  Spearfishing as a way of life
  
  
  
  Playing with water
  
  James Hamilton-Paterson takes us to a time not so distant and a country so far away that few of us will ever experience it
  
  
  Enjoy!
• 
  Hank Horse

  You’d think this wouldn’t work: a rich white Brit guy goes native in the Philippines, gets away from it all and fishes for a living, writes memoir. But J H-P is a gifted writer, and this book is a splendid success on many levels. Amid naturalist observation, autobiographical narrative, philippine history & culture are numerous vividly-drawn scenes that made me very happy to have picked up the book.
  
  His descriptions of place and the physical environment are lovely, and his accounts of his relationships with the people he lives near are interesting and well-observed. He is well aware of all the contradictions and tensions implicit in his situation, and reckons with them honestly and thoughtfully.
  
  Reading of his post-war British childhood made me laugh out loud, how delightful to be reminded of the boyish joys of spelunking and blowing things up! This book resonated with me also as a diver, as his descriptions of fishing and diving were absorbing.
  
  I highly recommend this book to anyone who loves good writing.
  
• 
  Martin

  Life in the provices of the Philippines.
  
  I live here and this novel is close to real life.
• 
  Mitch

  This book surprised me; I was expecting an interesting read but not a particularly poetic and insightful one. I really enjoyed the author's use of descriptive language about everything he turned his eye toward; his interior landscapes are as vivid as his external ones. None of what I'm saying tells you much about the book's contents, though. It mainly concerns the time he spent on an isolated island in the Phillipines, along with the people and ways of life he encountered there. I suppose one could throw in a reference to Robinson Crusoe here but that would be to miss the richness of the author's account.
  This is the first time I've given 5 stars in a while and I'm going to search for more from him.
• 
  Merzy Donovan

  One of the best accounts I've read of the Philippine marine life.
• 
  Andrew Schirmer

  Second read - I will try to find time to write a review of this extraordinary book.
• 
  Arlene

  I really loved reading about his interactions with the local Filipinos and I truly enjoyed his observations about the culture. But I didn't care much for his own story and ended up skipping chunks throughout the book that weren't about the Philippines. Still, with a dearth of Philippine culture books out there, I'm grateful to Mr. Hamilton-Paterson for writing this.
• 
  Juliet Wilson

  As I'm writing a novel for NaNoWriMo I'm trying to put myself in the right frame of mind by reading non-fiction books that relate to some of the themes found in my novel. Island living is one of these themes and one of the books I've chosen to read is Playing with Water by James Hamilton-Paterson.
  
  This book is a memoir centred on the years that Hamilton-Paterson spent living on an island he calls Tiwarik off the coast of the Phillipines. It is an uninhabited island but one that is popular with youngsters from nearby villages as a place to play, camp and fish. Hamilton-Paterson finds a niche for himself in the local community, not least because he turns out to be an expert spear fisherman.
  
  The author has a wonderful eye for detail and describes the underwater world beautifully, there is a particularly breathtaking sequence when he stays underwater almost too long and afterwards realises that the air he had been breathing had been tainted with oil, so his sightings became more and more dreamlike and surreal. He also meditates on the damage caused to the local ecology by the large ships that dynamite the coral reefs. He also is saddened by the fact that the local fishermen often use poisons and small amounts of explosives in their fishing, but realises that for them it is a matter of survival and making a few pennies at the local market. (Interestingly he doesn't seem to differentiate himself from the local spear fishermen, who use the most sustainable form of fishing, without reflecting that he made a choice to live there and kill those fish, while the local people have no choice if they are to stay in the area.)
  
  He also ponders his early life (at first I had found these flashbacks annoying, because I thought that the book was meant to be a travel book, but later I realised how insightful they are).
  
  Sadly since the book was written, the island of Tiwarik has been bought by a Japanese company and turned into a tourist resport.
• 
  Jen Freeman

  A really beautiful book.
• 
  Sarah

  Absolutely beautiful. Slow to start, but after the first chapter I settled into it. It's a LOT of description -- almost prose-poetry. I said 'beautiful' already, right? Beautiful.