‘Fiji 1970’ takes readers beyond the seas

Published: Wednesday, April 4, 2007 7:32 PM CDT
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Book signing today, Between the Covers, 4 p.m. to 6 p.m.

By Reilly Capps

Local Tom Tatum has published his first novel, a murder mystery and adventure loosely based on his experiences in the Peace Corps in Fiji around 1970 called, fittingly, “Fiji 1970.”

After years making TV shows, documentaries and movies, Tatum decided he wanted to create something wholly on his own.

Television is such a collaborative medium, with sometimes a dozen people consulting on every script change in every scene, that Tatum wanted to do something where he could work completely on his own to translate his visions into a story.

“I had always wanted to do a pure art project that wasn’t written by a committee,” he says. “A book is just the author’s vision, with a little fine-tuning from the editor.”

The book took him 10 years to write, from outline to final proofs.

The story is narrated by Cooper, an idealistic young man from a Norwood ranching family who joins the Peace Corps and travels to Fiji. Though Tatum himself was in the Peace Corps in Fiji from 1968-1971, Tatum says that Cooper is based on a composite of about 10 fellow volunteers in the Peace Corps.

The Fijian characters, on the other hand, are spot-on replications of the Fijians Tatum met while he was there. The only thing he changed, he said, were their names and the names of the villages they came from.

Tatum learned the Fijian language fluently and tried to immerse himself completely in the culture, from the religion to the medicine to the mysticism.

Cooper does much the same as he tries to solve the mystery of his murdered Fijian co-worker. His quest to find the truth leads him to abandon all his traditional Western values and dive into the world of Fijian witchcraft, as well as the ugly side of human nature and its universal greed.

The book is the first in a planned trilogy. The next book will follow Cooper back from the Peace Corps to Norwood and Telluride, a period Tatum lived through calls a “very dynamic” period in the area’s development.

“Fiji 1970” is available at Between the Covers and via the print-on-demand service from Xlibris Publishing.