Book Review
Island Going by Robert Atkinson. Birlinn 2008
Sea Room: An Island Life by Adam Nicolson. HarperCollins 2002
Lovers of islands (presumably most readers of the Voice!) may well know these two books already, but if not they should.
In July 1935, Robert Atkinson and John Ainslie set out on an ornithological search for the rare Leach’s Fork-tailed Petrel. Their search was to last for twelve years and to take them from their Oxford base to many of the remote and often deserted islands off the North West coast of Scotland (including North Uist, the Monarch Isles and St Kilda), to an almost inaccessible North Rona and, their search rewarded, beyond.
Robert Atkinson’s account of his twelve year adventure provides a detailed and emotive description of the wildlife and landscape of the Hebridean outlanders. He recounts with clarity his first sighting of a puffin, ‘So brand new was this unique first insight of puffins … they might have been of fresh creation: bright fantastic dolls but alive!’, and explains in detail the effort entailed in reaching the most inaccessible of islands. But more than that he records with compassion the lifestyles of the islanders, their living conditions, traditions and histories and notes too the changes they witnessed as the war years came and went. His writing has inspired many of the later accounts of Hebridean travel. Atkinson’s account of his travels, Island Going, was first published in 1949, and has established itself as one of the greatest of all memoirs of sailing in the Hebrides. It was republished in paperback by Birlinn in 2008.
Sea Room: An Island Life by Adam Nicolson describes – and relives – a love affair with three tiny islands in the Hebrides which the author had owned for the last twenty years. The Shiants (the name means the holy or enchanted islands) are a wild and dramatic place, with 500 foot high cliffs of black columnar basalt, surrounded by tide rips, filled in the summer with hundreds of thousands of seabirds and with a long and haunting history of hermits, shipwreckers, famine and eviction. Adam Nicolson’s father, Nigel, bought them as an Oxford undergraduate in 1937 for £1,400 and gave them to his son on his 21st birthday. They became the most important thing in his life, not only an escape but as the source of a deep engagement with the natural world in some of its most beautiful, alarming and all-encompassing forms.
Sea Room – a sailing term which Nicolson uses to mean ‘the sense of enlargement which island life can give you’ – is a long investigation of man’s relationship to these islands in particular and to islands in general. Why should a dark age hermit (whose cross-inscribed stone pillow the author discovered during an excavation of one of the Shiants’ ruins) have chosen this place to come nearer to his God? What was it that allowed four or five families to live here since the stone age? And what drove them out towards the end of 18th century? What is it about islands now that continues to have such a hold on the literary and the travelling imagination? This book is a response to all those questions, but also more than that: a hymn of praise by the author to the islands he owned and loved.
