2000

The year 2000 gives the novel a shared point of reference for its journeys, ecological inquiry, and speculation about what can survive across generations. On Taveuni, its arrival is not merely a change of date: the 180th meridian makes the island part of a Pacific contest over who can claim to enter the new millennium first, while a planned monument turns that calendrical boundary into a message addressed a thousand years ahead.

A Pacific contest over the date

The plans for Fiji’s millennium celebration arise from the unusual geography of the International Date Line. Apart from Antarctica and a narrow strip of Siberia, the Fijian islands are the only place on Earth crossed by the 180th meridian, where the transition from one date to the next takes place. Only Taveuni and a couple of other Fijian islands actually lie on that meridian.

The question of who would enter 2000 first became a public dispute among Pacific islands. To get ahead of Tonga and the small island of Little Pitt, Fiji introduced daylight saving time that year, moving its clocks forward by one hour only weeks before the conversation in which Frank explains the arrangement. The rivalry makes the calendar seem at once geographic and political: a line on the globe becomes a claim to precedence in the new millennium.

Taveuni and the expedition

Taveuni’s position on the meridian is part of why Ana and José were there. They had come to the island to prepare a television program about the twenty-first century, and one sequence was to be filmed on the International Date Line. Their program was completed and broadcast; José later gave Frank a copy of the video. Ana explains that it included a brief interview with Frank about biological diversity and the threat facing Oceania’s old habitats.

That interview connects the millennium’s public spectacle to the ecological subject of Frank’s work. His two-month expedition across the Pacific was concerned with how introduced plant and animal species affect ecological balance. He describes the vulnerability of isolated island ecosystems, where imported species, deforestation, and imprudent plantation development have damaged habitats and contributed to the danger facing native wildlife. Taveuni retains an especially rich bird population, including the Orange-breasted Pigeon, in part because the Indian mongoose was never brought to the island; the island’s ecology offers a concrete counterpoint to the damage discussed in the interview.

A monument for the fourth millennium

The 180th meridian is also the proposed site of a Millennium Monument. Visitors may place a greeting to the fourth millennium in a glass capsule, which is inserted into a hollow brick, sealed, and built into the monument. Each capsule costs five hundred dollars. A foundation is to maintain the structure for a thousand years and ensure that the capsules are opened at a ceremony on January 1, 3000.

José responds that the date lies far in the future. Frank, by contrast, is already considering placing a twentieth-century manifesto in a capsule. The proposal gives the year 2000 a long afterlife: it is not only the moment being celebrated, but the point from which the present tries to address a future it will not witness. The contrast between a costly, carefully maintained monument and the exposed habitats Frank discusses makes preservation—of messages as well as living environments—a central concern of the millennium scene.

Calendar time and narrative time

Elsewhere, the novel makes the year’s significance visible through the later account of Ana and José’s filmed program. Their broadcast preserves Frank’s interview after the expedition itself has passed, turning a brief encounter on Taveuni into recorded testimony. The year 2000 thus gathers several different kinds of time: the practical adjustment of clocks, the historical boundary of a new millennium, and the prolonged ecological changes that cannot be reversed by a single celebration.

The book’s recurring interest in cycles further complicates the apparent neatness of a millennial beginning. In a later discussion, Frank compares a fifty-two-year span of astronomical days with the Maya ritual calendar, observing that 18,980 days amount to 73 ritual years of 260 days, divided into 13 months. Against such longer and differently measured cycles, 2000 is a humanly chosen threshold rather than an absolute break in time. Its force comes from what people make of the date: a competition, a broadcast, a monument, and a promise to preserve something for those who come later.