Like everything else Hemingway wrote, Islands in the Stream is the opposite of a novel of ideas. It is a novel in which we find only the description of live action or the description of characters remembering or talking about past action: First in Bimini, where an expatriated American painter, Thomas Hudson, is joined by his sons for three weeks of fishing, snorkelling and swimming; then in Cuba, a few years later, where Thomas drinks and tells stories at a bar while waiting for orders from the Ministry of War; and finally at sea, where, from the flying bridge of his fishing boat, he leads a civilian militia in pursuit of German sailors who have escaped from their sinking submarine and disappeared into the Cuban archipelago. Highlighting a lack of ideas in the novel may sound like a criticism but it is not. The action is all so vividly and beautifully drawn by Hemingway that, after finishing the book, I seemed to see afterimages of its contents every time I closed my eyes: A large hammerhead shark charging at one of the boys as he is spear fishing near the reef—until Eddy, the cook, strafes it from the boat with a submachine gun and sends it aquaplaning across the surface of the water. Or a swordfish seen underwater at the stern of the boat after an epic five-hour battle with the same boy. To the horror of the exhausted angler, the hook has just slipped loose and now—foreshortened, winglike fins spread, growing smaller and smaller—the swordfish settles down into the darkness below like an exotic bird. Here are two men on a wharf at night, squaring up and circling each other in the chiaroscuro of pink and yellow flares and fireworks. And here, “the strange, hunger-driven impersonality of wading birds” seen by Thomas from the flying bridge of his boat as he follows the trail of the German sailors past a mosquito-infested island. On a first pass, it is tempting to apply to Hemingway Cezanne's famous remark about Monet: “He is only an eye—but what an eye!” Actually, though, that is unfair. It is true that Hemingway's characters do not discuss ideas. In keeping with my characterisation of Hemingway's work as the antithesis of philosophical fiction, Thomas makes a tremendous effort not to think at all—about the only woman he ever truly loved and then lost; about his two sons who died in a car crash in France soon after their visit to Bimini; and about the third who died years after them when his Spitfire was shot down over the ocean. But while Hemingway's characters may not discuss ideas, they do represent them. And it is this that elevates the novel above the status of a mere adventure story and gives it the philosophical seriousness to which its author never directly refers. We are on safe ground in reading the novel this way. The idea of a higher order of meaning that supervenes on the visible action squares up neatly with Hemingway’s own explanation of his work. “Meaning,” he said, “is established through dialogue, through action, and silences—a fiction in which nothing crucial—or at least very little—is stated explicitly.” This “theory of omission,” as it would later be called, gave Hemingway a basic method of operating and informed the sparing prose style for which he would become famous (and which would also seem to explain the photographic quality of his work): An accumulation of short, declarative sentences and concrete objects designed to build up each scene in the mind of the reader point by point. It would be vulgar to take Hemingway’s hint too far and suppose that, say, Thomas Hudson is really just a symbol of mankind and what happens to him an allegory of the human experience. Islands in the Stream is not an allegory and each character and event has its own independent reality. But I think we are justified in standing back from the sequence of action and asking ourselves what it can tell us about Hemingway’s philosophy of life. And when I do this I find myself thinking of Franz Kafka. I realise that the comparison of two such different writers is bound to sound absurd, but I believe it can be reasoned out. Kafka’s novels portray the universe as an incomprehensible and hostile place in which the individual is lonely, perplexed and threatened. On its face this would seem to make for grim reading. But there is something else that saves Kafka from being a depressing writer and makes his novels unexpectedly uplifting: The unwavering, almost invincible reasonableness of his characters. In The Castle as in The Trial, neither K. nor Josef K. once throws up his hands and walks away in the face of unrelenting injustice and absurdity. Instead, each redoubles his efforts, redoubles his reasonableness—losing neither his determination to escape the mysterious forces that are persecuting him nor even his curiosity about them. In Hemingway, the situation is different in aspect but similar in essence. Thomas Hudson faces tragedy and loss of a more sublunary kind than Kafka’s heroes; but like them, he does not allow himself to be swallowed up by despair. Instead, he does what all Hemingway’s characters do: He responds to his suffering with masculine stoicism and practical action—either action to remedy his suffering or, if his suffering is irremediable, action to distract himself from it and provide him with a sense of purpose. And how do we reconcile this reading of the novel with the fact that its author shot himself in 1961? Hemingway, we may assume, tried to perfect in art what he could not perfect in life.