Winter book reviews from South Seas Books

Winter book reviews

by Mark Laurie of South Seas Books, Port Elliot.

The Colony

by Audrey Magee

Published by Faber & Faber ISBN 9780571367603 $29.99

An English artist and a French linguist arrive on a remote, lightly populated Irish island. Each escaping their broken family and seeking to transform their professional fortune with studies of this little-known, less-visited place. Profoundly antagonistic towards one another, the islanders are forced to make adjustments for peace, adding to the burden of accommodating the two men with their burgeoning needs and demands. The islanders do so resourcefully and equably, in stark contrast to the escalating Troubles on the mainland, as Republicans and Loyalists murder each other ceaselessly. This thoughtful novel, adorned with painterly descriptions and a dialogue flowing effortlessly in twin English and Irish streams, has much to say about human relations at personal and political levels. Drawing from the long anthropological tradition of islands as cultural petri dishes, the author engages the seemingly unresolvable dialectics which have marked this literary tradition, between nature and civilisation, simplicity and sophistication, community and individual, marking the vast distance to the great ‘Other’ of the outside world. In doing so, the author employs islanders aware of the lines drawn in our politics and religions, the results of our ‘believ(ing) what we want to believe’, and easily avoids the tropes of lost islands and last tribes. Despite this agency however, the book suggests that the colonial experiment did not end in the aftermath of world war. While less violent, quieter and ostensibly more reasonable, it persists unchecked and insidious; the new colonisers always taking much more than they give.

The Lessons

by John Purcell

Published by Fourth Estate, an imprint of Harper Collins ISBN 9781460756997 $32.99

John Purcell’s latest novel leads with the idea that innocence is short lived and provides both storyline and character studies in support. Ardent teenage love flares in 1960s England, a sort of Blue Lagoon story conducted, perhaps slightly less picturesquely, in gumboots in the byres of rural Kent. The fervent relationship between Daisy and Harry is challenged by differences in class, education and life expectations, along with some malevolent family members unwilling or unable to bridge those differences, prising the young lovers apart. Daisy is sent to live with her aunt, a successful author, and travels with her wealthy set to the French Riviera where she grows up…fast. As with the author’s previous novel, there are plenty of literary references leavened with smatterings of wry self-parody to ensure nothing is taken too seriously. The fictional novel from which the book’s title is taken is described by a reviewer as ‘a woman’s view of a man’s world’, and the opposite might well apply here. F. Scott Fitzgerald is the most obvious reference point, adapted to those very English preoccupations with class and sex while looking over their shoulder towards the French. The pages turned quickly and easily, the plot line was pacey, and the characters were both interesting and well-developed. In the end though, the titular ‘lessons’ amounted rather less to a moral code and rather more to swimming in Jay Gatsby’s pool, in the shallow end where all that was beautiful might be seen from the surface.

Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape

by Cal Flyn

Published by William Collins (an imprint of Harper Collins) ISBN 9780008329808 $27.99

This thoroughly modern take on humanity’s urge for exploration circles back to places thoroughly colonised and then thoroughly abandoned, after war or disaster, nuclear meltdown, profound environmental degradation or contamination, political, economic or social collapse. The author visits places as diverse as Detroit and Verdun, Cyprus and Chernobyl, Swona and the Salton Sea, explaining their evacuation and describing all that remains. The ‘islands’ here are both actual and metaphorical, the latter varying between ‘razed urban prairie’, grand-scale mining wastes, ordinance-laden war zones, and swathes of dispossession, unified in having been lost to us, largely through our own actions. The author brings considerable research skills, background reading and storytelling flair to this, her second book, providing us with a series of truly fascinating, multilayered place studies. Immediately attractive to anyone who has enjoyed reading or watching I Am Legend, who thrills to the apocalyptic, it will appeal equally to those familiar with the thoughts of James Lovelock and E. O. Wilson, interested in more radical environmentalism and rewilding at ‘landscape scale’. Its greatest value and most profound act though, is to provide us with evidence that nature can and might recover in our absence, despite us and our interventions. There is something deeply soothing about stories evidencing ‘new life springing from the wreckage of the old,’ of reforestation and ecological diversity in such unpromising spaces. No free pass to a continuation of our reckless and profligate past and present, such narratives of redemption provide small, bright lights of resilience and hope to those willing and able to look beyond anthropocentric constraint. Highly recommended. tenancy and its manifest challenges. Despite the inevitable pressures following such a successful debut, there remains much to enjoy in this sequel. An eye and ear for nature, capturing and conjuring the small but significant influences which direct our lives, together with an ability to inspire, make Winn’s books a lasting joy. Non-denominational hymns to landscape and memory, they reinforce nature’s healing power, the durable importance of literature, and the kindness living quietly among us and on foot. It more closely resembles the retreat-literature style of Walden, transposed a century later from Thoreau’s pond to a vastly different space and scale, mixing adventure and anecdote with natural history, geology, high art, philosophy and environmental activism. Abbey rails against the arrogance of anthropocentricity, revelling in nature’s ‘implacable indifference’ to ‘the little world of men.’ One beautiful chapter describes a trip on the Colorado River through a magical Glen Canyon, capturing the existential distress and collective impoverishment of its impending loss to submersion under Lake Powell, a boating playground. Were he alive today, Abbey’s anarchic nature would be enjoying Lake Powell’s recreational demise to drought resulting from human-induced climate change, and Glen Canyon’s steady re-emergence.

The Wild Silence

by Raynor Winn Published by Michael Joseph, an imprint of Penguin Books ISBN 9780143136422 $22.99

Building from the extraordinary success of her debut The Salt Path, Raynor Winn fleshes out her story, both returning to her past as she deals with the death of her mother and the memories it invokes, and taking us forward into the years immediately following her inspiring journey along England’s South West Coast Path. Settling in a small town in Cornwall for her husband Moth to study, the couple struggle with a new life and his decline from the rare terminal illness with which he’s afflicted. We learn of the genesis of Winn’s writing career, born from a desire to arrest Moth’s loss of memory and to maintain the healing power of their long walk and wild camping experience, before it launches successfully, changing their lives and others. It is her book which provides their next pathway, an opportunity to rewild and rejuvenate an overgrazed and badly degraded farm. Drawing from an obscure literary reference read many years before, and facing an otherwise uncertain future, they accept the

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