A World of Isolatoes

Islands: A Trip through Space and Time, by Peter Conrad; Thames & Hudson, 2009, 192 pages, $45.

Islands are philosophically odd things: they were central to Locke’s bold moves against feudal tenure rights in the eighteenth century which made property transferable from the physical effort put into finding, cultivating and ultimately consuming its produce. Islands are more easily marked by such activities: that is why Shakespeare sets Prospero on one, and Defoe has Robinson Crusoe take possession of his. Islands were a new standard of independence in laying claim to the biggest parcel of land of all, the United States, which is manifestly no island. And they have their unbargained for “subtleties”, as Prospero called them—the power of generating noises, apparitions and events on their own account. Their very names—Bermuda, St Kilda, Ceylon, Spitsbergen—are of great imaginative potency. Islands are subtle enough to become individuals. And not only that: they can become rafts of righteousness—close enough to the “world” for observations to be cast at it, and far enough away from it to evade responsibility for the effect of the said observations.

Peter Conrad was born on one (Tasmania) and has never entirely surmounted the experience, even though he has been an Oxford don for the best part of forty years now. Growing up on Tasmania (a rather large island even if it does lie at the end of things) “immediately determined the way I would see the world. I see that world from a distance, as if I do not belong to it—or has it perhaps expelled and ostracized me?” Exactly as for most of its penal inhabitants, who were banished rather than born there, Tasmania—“that small, morbid island”—fostered dreams of escape. Certainly islands are peripheral, but in these days of negotiable, imagined centres, it might be thought that growing up as a skewed castaway offers something of a perspectival advantage. But solipsism is the subject: a good deal of this short book is taken up with a discussion of how Daniel Defoe seized on the story of Alexander Selkirk, abandoned for four years on Juan Fernandez Island (where he eventually lost the ability to speak), and turned it into the modern gospel story of Cartesian man with no option other than to use his wits and conquer a parcel of land he could call his own. But aren’t some islands too big or historically important to be thought of as such? “The British Isles, for Defoe, were an extension of Crusoe’s little kingdom,” asserts Conrad—what of Japan, Greenland, Madagascar, even Australia itself?

Tasmania made Peter Conrad an introvert. But it would implausibly seem the entire cause of his intellectual and stylistic restlessness. And indeed, once the initial recollections subside, Conrad embarks, not on the huge ambitious journey offered by his subtitle but on a rather whimsical round of island-hopping. The island as imaginative construct is what gets him going.

Aside from the extended day with Crusoe, we pay fleeting visits to Marguerite Yourcenar on Mount Desert Island off the coast of Maine, Anton Chekhov taking the hard route across Siberia to Sakhalin and then sailing back via Hong Kong and Ceylon, Auden revolted by fish soup made with brilliantine in Iceland, Marlon Brando purchasing the atoll of Tetiaroa near Tahiti where he could pretend to be Fletcher Christian off screen too, Robert Louis Stevenson’s brave and surprising attempt to stand up to the colonisers on behalf on the natives of Samoa. We go from the island as paradise—Calypso, Cythera, the Greek islands, Tyre, Goethe’s Sicily—via such fabled islands as Atlantis and even Utopia to rather more purgatorial not to say sinister instances: Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead, Stromboli, Pitcairn and Napoleon on St Helena.

Conrad being Conrad, we are apprised of the fascinating snippet that Ingmar Bergman chanced upon Fårö in 1959 while looking for a location to shoot Through a Glass Darkly, but had originally intended filming it in the Orkneys. And Defoe’s Crusoe provides him with an opportunity to fast-forward not just to Michel Tournier’s Friday, in which the main character emerges as an existentialist, but J.G. Ballard’s memorably bizarre Concrete Island, a parodic tale of a man stranded for days on a traffic island in the middle of the Westway in London.

Hopping between islands without really knowing which one you’re going to next (or even why you’re headed there) can be an exhausting and ultimately futile exercise. What Conrad offers in archipelagic erudition he takes away in insular analysis. I read his book on a health mission to St Lucia shortly after visiting an old friend from school who has settled on Shetland; they may both be islands but there the similarity ends. One has all the problems of being a micro-nation in the Caribbean chain with a neighbour, Martinique, that enjoys a standard of living on a level with Europe (and is actually considered an “ultraperipheral” part of the EU); the other of preserving through judicial use of North Sea oil revenue its semi-Norse identity within a Scotland newly asserting its own within the United Kingdom. Before that, I worked for three years in Indonesia, a true multi-ethnic archipelago of 17,000 islands, some of which vanish or emerge from year to year. Every island there is quite different from its neighbour.

Conrad himself must have visited many islands in his life, but there is no description of actual visits in this book; and no overarching narrative theme that might have introduced some kind of logic into his argument. Given his imaginative abandon, it is surprising that he doesn’t mention René Daumal’s cult-novel Mount Analogue, especially since it, like one of Gulliver’s half-imagined islands, is set close to where Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) turned out to exist: it manages to fuse the appeal of the island with that of the mountain, a no less mythic construct. Daumal, it has been suggested, wanted to do for metaphysics what Jules Verne had done for physics. The writerly consciousness, it seems, is irresistibly attracted to rafts with summits.

If you weren’t born on an island, Conrad suggests, you will in the course of your life “have adopted or acquired one”. Some people wealthy enough actually do so, of course: there is even an internet real estate agency catering solely for clients “of significant solvency” who wish to become isolatoes (as Melville called them) on the sea-lapped strand of their personal fief; others want to get their islands rid of the rats and give it a second chance, all green. Conrad reminds us that some islands started out as blessed, but became a synonym for perdition because they chose separation—“like devils”. That was Milton’s view of Tenerife in Paradise Lost. Fallenness is truly what Conrad is talking about. “Remorse makes us value what we have destroyed or discarded: geopolitically, islands are once again an attractive proposition.” But remorse cannot change the fact that Donne was wrong to say that no man is an island: “every man inhabits one”. That would seem to have come true for most of the inhabitants of big modern cities. We are not just “isolatoes”, we are co-isolated, all of us existing in an interdependency of loosely adjacent insularities, which in Conrad’s analogical world ought to call to mind those claustrophobic modular pods—capsule hotels—offered to Japanese businessmen for a couple of thousand yen as a room for the night. Inhabitable islands don’t get smaller than that.

Iain Bamforth lives in Strasbourg.