Word: irma
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Around Irma and Sam-and an assortment of turn-of-the-century islanders-Novelist William March fashions a choice tropical romp in the serio-comic vein of Satirists Aubrey Menen and Edgar Mittelholzer...
...Irma Barnfield has been a missionary's wife too long not to recognize their new South Pacific station, October Island, as a "comedown." But she knows better than to complain. To her husband Sam, so dedicated that he has never consummated his marriage, it is simply another "field that awaits the plow of the Lord...
...Rahabaat. The natives have all the sins of the senses, but no sense of sin. They worship Rahabaat, a god who lives in the local volcano, with frank fertility rites. When Sam preaches his Vermont fundamentalism at the men, they giggle and slip away into the underbrush. When Irma tries to clothe the women in sacklike dresses of her own design, they cut holes in the tops to bare their breasts. After a brief vogue, even this ventilated version goes out of fashion. When the natives hear of Irma's virginity, they laughingly dub her "The One Too Slippery...
Lapping up the adulation of her new post as high priestess, Irma is none too happy when Sam takes sick and the mission board orders the couple home for a test. To invoke her return, the natives toss hundreds of piglets into the volcano and finally even their own infants. Sure enough, back in Vermont Sam dies, and Irma heads for the island again...
Everybody is overjoyed. The natives have lost most of their children, are half-Christian, but have their virgin goddess Irma has lost her husband, is half-pagan but has the adoration she loves As for Author March, he has had the pleasure of some deft ironic thrusts, at the expense of almost everybody but the reader nography of irrelevant chatter, its sleep-enticing rhythms, its delight in obsessive enumeration of uninteresting objects, and its aggravating tone of false naivete...