Weary of his life in Victorian England, teacher Robert James Fletcher went looking for Stevenson's trail and beauty in the South Seas in 1912. Until 1920 he wrote his friend Bohun Lynch in Oxford from the New Hebrides, called Vanuatu after independence in 1980. Letters and diary entries reminiscent of the traveling Rimbaud are pitiless, personal, poetic, ethnographic and have a grim humor. Lynch published the letters after Fletcher was declared missing. No one knows when or where he died. In 'Isles of Illusion' actor Ulrich Wildgruber takes time off from the theatre and lands on Vanuatu 75 years after Fletcher. He is under the spell of the letters from the South Seas, and the book acts as a treasure map on his search for Fletcher's world. In the end he makes an astounding discovery about Fletcher's fate.
