“It aims to reflect the values and outlooks of those who have rejected the trivial and the temporary in an island context.
Often individual authors achieve exactly this effect, - Fowles on the Scillies, Yeats on Aran and Mike Tomkies in his shack conveying, via Williamson, how deeply he ‘understands the magnificent Highland wilderness’ and trusts in work, because everything else is therapy. This is powerful writing. So much so that, much as I admire Virginia Woolf, her writing – the next item – seems effete, composed in a hotel room aftern having driven round the Isle of Skye. IT seemed appropriate that Mike Tomkies work should be so close to the centre of the book.
Some things will mature into permanent memories, like Barrie ‘hiding from the scenery’, or Ball’s fine description of Irish rain, ‘absolute, magnificent and frightening.’
The bare quality of island life unearths something relentless and penetrative in me, core-deep and hitting the spot often enough and impressively enough to be worth every minute spent in reading it. Several contributors left me with a glow that was remarkably slow to fade. One or two haven’t faded at all.
Selwyn Veater |
This wonderful, anthology of 20th century prose inspired by the islands around the entire coast of Britain and Ireland has an epigraph by the late Roger Deakin:
The wildness of Jura was just the kind of thing Orwell's police state in 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' had abolished, because they knew such wilderness nourished freedom of thought and action.
This deeply enriching collection of extracts from autobiographies, letters, journals, articles and travel writing reveals that many of the finest writers of the 20th century have also sought that same freedom of thought on islands. Hence, we have deeply perceptive and sensitive writing about islands from such literary luminaries as W.B. Yeats, Virginia Woolf, John Betjeman, Gavin Maxwell, Kathleen Raine, R.S. Thomas, John Fowles and of course, George Orwell himself. This fascinating collection also contains many distinguished Scottish writers such as George MacKay Brown, Hugh MacDiarmid, Kathleen Jamie, Sorley MacLean and Ian Crichton Smith who writes not only about his native Lewis but about Iona as well.
This anthology contains a helpful map which shows the position of all the islands included, from the Scillies to the Shetlands, from the Aran Islands to Hebrides, from Anglessey to the Orkneys. The editor, James Knox Whittet, who outlines the nature of the book in a beautiful and profound Foreword, was born and brought up in Islay where his father was the head gardener at Dunlossit Castle and whose paternal grandmother came from a crofting family in Skye. He is certainly well qualified to undertake this task of bringing the finest island writing together for the very first time.
One of the many delights of this book, is that it contains pieces by less well-known writers such as Sheila Gear's who write movingly about her beloved Foula and her ambivalent feelings about the survival of the island after its last, stubborn inhabitants have gone:
Long, long after we are gone from this world, the isle will still be our island. The wind will still roar through the hills, the seas still pound against its cliffs,. The isle does not need us, it can stand alone. This is our sorrow and our comfort.
This is the sort of book one wants to go on quoting from: surely a test of the finest anthologies. The editor states that he hopes that readers will be left with unforgettable images and that is precisely what one is left with after reading or simply browsing through this feast of island prose.
I vividly recall the tragic figure of Unity Mitford, a cousin of Winston Churchill, after her failed suicide attempt, sitting alone on the pier of Inchkenneth gazing longingly out to sea.
I recall the Raasay crofter's ten year struggle to build a road to his remote township. Day after day, he sets off in wind and rain with his homemade wheelbarrow, his pick and shovel to gouge out rock.
The great Scots poet, Hugh MacDiarmid arrives on the Shetland island of Whalsay in the 1930's, both physically and psychologically a broken man, and finds a kind of healing living among the crofters and fishermen who he comes to feel have a deeper sense of the true drama of life.
Of course each reader of this inspiring anthology will come away with his or her own favourite images which enable them to see our too often neglected islands with deepened perceptions. For each reader, this will be both a geographical and spiritual journey. As with his previous island anthology, 100 Island Poems ( nominated as one of the Books of the Year by The Scotsman in 2005) the editor begins with the tiny island of Scolt Head, off the coast of Norfolk and travels clockwise around our coast so that every major island group is covered. Apart from everything else, this book is a lesson in geography – one finds that many people are quite ignorant about the positions of even the largest British islands. As one might expect, a number of the prose passages are about the pilgrimages of saints and mystics throughout the ages who sought to find God on lonely, abandoned rocks such as the extraordinary Skellig Michael which lies off the west coast of Ireland.
However, before the voyage begins, James Knox Whittet includes a passage by Gavin Maxwell who recalls a particular day when he was stationed in London in 1940, during the Battle of Britain, having narrowly avoided death after a bombing raid. Along with a friend, he unfolds a map of Scotland on the floor and recites the lyrical, evocative names of Hebridean islands such as Rona, Canna and Staffa and makes the following resolution:
If I'm alive when the war's over I'm going to buy an island in the Hebrides and retire there for life; no aeroplanes, no bombs, no Commanding Officer, no rusty dannert wire.
I know of no more stimulating literary companion than Writers On Islands for those of us who dream of islands.
A Barker |
