Mr. Fortune's Maggot — Sylvia Townsend Warner

The Reverend Timothy Fortune, ex-bank clerk, has spent 10 years as a South Seas Island missionary when a "maggot" impels him to embark on an assignment to the even more remote island of Fanua, where a white man is a rarity. Mr. Fortune is a good man, humble and earnest. He wishes to bring the joys of Christianity to the innocent heathen. But in his 3 years on Fanua, he makes only one convert -- the boy Lueli, who loves him. This love, and the sensuous freedom of the islanders, produces in Mr. Fortune a change of heart that is shattering. Beautifully imagined, the paradise island and its people are as vivid as a Gauguin painting.