‘A Sphere of Symbols’: Thor Heyerdahl’s Maldive Mystery

‘La tua beltà – chissà averla che impegno –
ardendo nell’ampolla se ne va: volevo
solo dire ‘beltà’.’

‘Your beauty – who knows what duty in having it –
flaring in the phial it leaves: I wanted
only to say ‘beauty’.’
-Andrea Zanzotto, ‘Ampolla (cisti) e fuori’, from La Beltà
Norwegian ethnographer, Thor Heyerdahl, is not known for being a good historian. This is evident from a quick Google search; sifting through the results pulls up the words such as ‘mistakes’, ‘incorrect’ and ‘wrong’ in connection with Heyerdahl. However, these inaccuracies are irrelevant when one assesses the enjoyment his writing evokes.
To demand that the reader form their opinion of Heyerdahl’s work in line with the truth of history – did Sri Lankans arrive in the Maldives en masse? Did a sun cult precede a Buddhist population that preceded the present-day Muslim society? – is to demand that the layman subscribe to a particular specialist’s code of ethics, and shun everything that falls outside it. This is too much to ask, especially when Heyerdahl’s The Maldive Mystery is such a completely joyous experience.
Theroux compared Heyerdahl to a ‘hack writer of detective stories’. There is some truth to that, and the author revels in the cheapness of his narrative. The Maldive Mystery is a chronicle of his time spent in the Maldives, unearthing various relics and trying to piece together the islands’ pre-Muslim history. It is also patterned after clichéd detective stories; only, instead of a hysterical broad on the other end of a phone, we have a mysterious photo from a colleague appearing in the mail. Instead of a washed-up private detective narrating to us through his last few sips of bourbon, we have Heyerdahl staring at a ceiling fan and admitting his ‘embarrassment’ at being so woefully unprepared for the task ahead. Throughout the book, as in a detective novel, everything is a key to be fitted in a lock: individual elements return again and again, a distinctive type of masonry referred to as ‘fingerprint masonry’, the stupas dotted around the islands, the iconography of the sun – just as the same clues are pieced together by a brilliant investigator in a myriad of different ways as elements enter and leave his novel’s web of relationships.

Heyerdahl has incredible facility with his prose, and this sentence is as perfect as anything written by the masters. It repeats the motif of the author’s obsessions: the sea, the currents, the diaspora, the oral tradition. He sees himself as the reverse of this initial Muslim traveler who peacefully converted the Maldivian way of life and set about eradicating traces of the islands’ former society. The operation is the linguistic equivalent of Heyerdahl’s famous Kon-Tiki expedition, in which the author successfully navigated the open seas on a primitive raft to prove that humans of pre-history were capable of migrating across the oceans. In The Maldive Mystery, he is building new rafts: assertions about linguistic coincidences, tales of conversations with museum curators, explanations of ancient trade routes in precious shells. With these rafts he crosses the world, bringing influence from and to a vast number of countries, jumping through impossibly remote relationships between disparate pieces of evidence, connecting everywhere to the Maldives, a nation that becomes nothing but another realm in the sphere of symbols, while the reader, almost in stupefaction, can do nothing but sit back and laugh at the hilarious exuberance of it all.
By Jonathan Guilford