Literary Islands / Features / Untitled Books

The idea of islands, whether as places of escape and refuge or of exile and punishment, lies deep in the human psyche.

Literary Islands

Islands have long provided the perfect microclimate for the novel, concentrating the action, testing character and contending with nature. SAM TAYLOR's new novel The Island at the End of the World updates this idea, and gives it a contemporary bite. He examines a rich thread of islands novels from Shakespeare to Huxley.

into a game of theatrical illusions and erotic enchantments, Urfe finds himself in a dreamlike paradise which slowly but surely turns to a nightmarish Hell.

The fantasy of being stranded on a remote island, alone or as part of a small group of people, is something most of us have indulged in at some point - and that has been true for centuries, even before it became a staple of reality TV. The idea of islands, whether as places of escape and refuge or of exile and punishment, lies deep in the human psyche. Personally, I've always loved the idea of living far from civilisation, and whenever I think of getting old, it is an archetypal island image that comes to mind: of myself alone somewhere small, hot and fertile, living in a tiny wooden hut, lying in a hammock, reading books and fishing for my supper. In reality, the closest I have come to fulfilling my fantasy of escaping to an island is to write a novel about it - The Island at the End of the World, published later this month by Faber.

My book follows in a long line of other, invented islands - literary islands; islands of the mind. What connects the islands of this fictional archipelago is not only the fact that you will not find them on any map, or that they isolate the characters of their books from all outside influences, allowing their most primal instincts to reign unchecked, but that each island emanates a unique sense of mystery, whether dreamlike or nightmarish (or often a mixture of the two) which suggests that they are metaphors for the human mind - perhaps specifically the mind of their author. Donne wrote that no man is an island; I am proposing that each island is a man.

This is most literally true, perhaps, in the first great literary island - that of Prospero, in Shakespeare's The Tempest. Here, the island is not merely a setting but a character in the drama. It is both a place of natural magic - 'The isle is full of noises/ Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not' - and the instrument of Prospero's own, darker, more human magic. Through his wizardry, the island shipwrecks people, traps them, sends them to sleep, exposes their lies, and saves their lives. It is a place where anything might happen - where hopes and fears come true - and as such it is the template for many of the islands that followed.

The island on which Robinson Crusoe was shipwrecked in Daniel Defoe's novel, 110 years later, is a more neutral, naturalistic invention. It provides Crusoe with the basics of life, and he comes to appreciate its beauty, but for most of the narrative he spends his time on the island trying to escape it - to return to civilisation. It is only afterwards, when he is back in Portugal and suddenly becomes rich, that he truly understands how lucky he was on the island: 'I had more care upon my head now than I had in my silent state of life in the island, where I wanted nothing but what I had, and had nothing but what I wanted.'

William Golding was so attracted to the idea of islands that both his first two novels were set upon them. In Lord of the Flies, the island is a benign place, and all the horror that takes place upon it is brought there in the young souls of the boys; it is like a re-enactment of the Fall in Eden, without even having a snake or a woman to blame for what goes wrong. In Pincher Martin, the tropical island is replaced by a grim and tiny rock in the middle of the North Atlantic, and the plane-full of schoolboys by one man. As he clings to his last hours of life upon this most desolate of islands, drinking rainwater and eating sea-anemones, Christopher Hadley Martin is haunted by the banal evils of his own past. Here, the island is transformed into a symbol of man's aloneness; the inescapability of one's self.

If Martin's island was a projection of his fears and regrets, the island in The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares is one populated by the ghosts of his secret desires and longings. The story concerns a man who has escaped to a small island because he is a fugitive from the law. He is warned that the island is home to a mysterious disease, but his life is so unbearable that he decides to go anyway. On the island are a museum, a church and a swimming pool - but no people. And then, miraculously, some tourists arrive, and the fugitive falls in love with one of them. He approaches her, but she pays no attention to him. Over the days that follow, he discovers that none of the tourists are able to see or hear him. And then, one day, they all vanish, leaving no trace of ever having been there at all. A strange, short, haunting story, The Invention of Morel was praised by Casares's eminent friend Jorge Luis Borges as 'a perfect novel'. It has also been featured in the TV series Lost.

Written in a similar tone, but much longer and more complex and spectacular, is John Fowles's bestselling novel, The Magus. Phraxos, the name of the island in the novel, does not exist, but unlike the other islands in this article, it is based on a real place - the Greek island of Spetsai. However, naturalism goes out of the window once the book's narrator, Nicholas Urfe, discovers a house belonging to a rich man named Conchis, among whose guests are a pair of beautiful English twins. Seduced into a game of theatrical illusions and erotic enchantments, Urfe finds himself in a dreamlike paradise which slowly but surely turns to a nightmarish Hell. As with Pincher Martin, what haunts the book's protagonist are his own past crimes and shames, but in contrast to Golding, Fowles makes a melodrama out of his hero's spiritual crisis. Woody Allen once said, when asked what he would change in his life could he live it again, that he would do everything the same except for watching the movie of The Magus. I doubt whether many people will feel that way about reading the book, though, which - for all its flaws - is one of the most exciting and absorbing novels I've ever read.

One of the influences on Bioy Casares's book was the similarly titled but much more famous HG Wells novel, The Island of Dr Moreau. This vision of an island ruled by an evil scientist, in turn inspired by The Tempest, is essentially a novel of dystopia: the island becomes home to a breed of half-human animals created by the scalpel and twisted mind of the vivisectionist. If The Island of Dr Moreau is the island-as-Hell, then its mirror opposite is Aldous Huxley's Island. In this book, more noteworthy for its ideas than for its story or writing, a cynical journalist is sent to investigate the presence of oil reserves on an island paradise, where a combination of western science and eastern philosophy has produced a veritable utopia. His experiences on the island free him from cynicism, but can he save paradise from its imminent destruction by the rest of the world?

Finally, Jules Verne's The Mysterious Island is probably the mirror opposite of Golding's Lord of the Flies - in the sense that, rather than a natural paradise being ruined by human evils, the island in this novel is a wild place tamed and civilised (in the best sense of the word) by human virtues. Based on the true story of Alexander Selkirk, who survived alone for almost five years on an uninhabited island off the coast of Chile, The Mysterious Island is the story of five men and a dog who land their hot-air balloon in a remote place where strange and wonderful things happen to them. The solution to the island's mystery may seem bathetic and improbable, but it also suggests a belief, not only in man's goodness and ingenuity, but in some benign higher power which guides our fates.

No matter what you believe about life and the world, no matter what you fear or hope, there is an island somewhere out there for you. You may not be able to locate it on a map, but look through the shelves of a bookshop and I'm sure you'll find it.

Tuesday, 13 January, 2009