I’ve always loved books set on islands. As a kid growing up in the landlocked province of Ontario, my lived experience with islands was largely limited to the rocky, evergreen-covered islet just across the bay of Trout Lake, where I learned to swim. The idea of an island big enough to actually live on—perfectly contained and preferably isolated, a world apart—was irresistably romantic to my young mind. The smaller, more remote, or more removed it was from the conventional suburban family life I knew, the more appeal an island setting had for me as a reader.
The island books of my young adulthood ranged from thrilling tales of adventure (Treasure Island, Swiss Family Robinson) to tender coming of age stories (Anne of Green Gables) to haunting portrayals of human violence (Lord of the Flies). That last title was was assigned reading in Canadian middle schools in my day, and was almost enough to me put off island books forever. Thirty-odd years on, I still feel sorry for Piggy, as a fellow myope. But I digress.
The books on my list for this week bring you to three islands, in three very different parts of the world.
The Island of Sea Women by Lisa See
The island of the title is Jeju, the largest island in South Korea. Though the story begins and ends in 2008, when Jeju has become a popular tourism destination, much of the novel is set during much darker times in its history. In 1938, when Jeju is under Japanese occupation, friends Mi-ja and Young-sook are two of the youngest members of the haenyeo, the island’s all-female diving collective. The novel follows the two women over decades, as they enter into arranged marriages, become mothers, and struggle to survive as WWII and then the Korean War reach the island, with devastating consequences for both their families and their friendship.
This book is fascinating and heartbreaking in equal measure, with an emotional rhythm not unlike the ocean on a changeable day: periods of enchantingly beautiful calm; slow-building swells that keep you turning the pages, even as you are tempted to seek the shore; an ever-present awareness of depths and forces to which even the strongest swimmer is entirely vulnerable. I was absorbed and ultimately buoyed by this novel, if occasionally swamped by some very intense passages.
Fun fact: today there is a haenyeo museum on Jeju, which I would dearly love to visit.
Mister Pip, by Lloyd Jones
The island of this novel is Bougainville, a tropical sliver of land in the Solomon Sea with a heart of copper and gold. Our narrator, Matilda, is thirteen years old when years of tension over exploitative mining practices finally erupt into a brutal civil war. She and her mother are among the relatively few villagers still living on Bougainville after the blockade, as is Mr. Watts, the only white man on the island. Much to the delight of the village kids, who are unceasingly curious about his eccentric habits, Mr. Watts steps into the vacated post of schoolteacher. He has no formal training and just one book to guide him: a paperback copy of Great Expectations. The fictional world of Pip and Victorian England becomes an invaluable refuge for Matilda and many of the islanders—even as Dickens’ story begins to collide with reality in dangerous, entirely unexpected ways.
You don’t have to have read Great Expectations to fully understand and love this story, though it may inspire you to pick it up. It did for me. It also sent me to Google, as it slowly began to dawn on me that Jones was doing for the islanders what Dickens once did for the poor in London.
I was a teenager in the 90s, when the Bougainville Civil War was happening—and I had no idea that the island even existed. However, this isn’t (just) because I was a blissfully ignorant, self-obsessed kid; the conflict did not receive the international attention it deserved at the time. As Matilda puts it: “perhaps if we had been starving to death the outside world would have helped. We would have been an aid project.” Sigh.
ICYMI: In 2027, Bougainville is going to become the first newly independent country since South Sudan in 2011—another historical event I totally missed. (In fairness, I was the radically sleep-deprived mother of a six-month-old at the time.)
Celine, by Peter Heller
Unlike Bougainville and Jeju, the island in this novel is not war-torn, isolated, or tropical. A woodsy idyll just off the coast of Connecticut, Fishers Island is dotted by the palatial summer places of the American elite. Our heroine, Celine, spends part of her childhood in her grandmother’s villa on Fishers, learning to sail, and most of the rest at an exclusive boarding school, haunted all the while by the absence of her father following her parents’ divorce. If the phrase “poor little rich girl” just popped into your head, you’re not entirely off the mark and yet the phrase does not do her character justice, at all.
When we first meet her on the page, Celine is a sixty-eight year-old private investigator, about to take on her final case. She carries a Glock under her elegant clothes, takes on “lost causes” pro bono, and suffers from an advanced case of emphysema.
I can’t say much about the plot without ruining it for you, so I won’t. Just know that this book is a literary thriller that braids two mysteries together, both of which will engage your heart as much as your head. Think spectacular scenery, well-guarded secrets, fractured families, witty dialogue, and occasional gunfire. It’s 333 pages but feels even shorter, probably because I tore through it in a matter of days.
One final, curiosity-piquing fact: if she sounds too outrageous to be “real,” you should know Celine is heavily based on Heller’s own mother. (!)
Have you read, or do you want to read, any of these books? Do tell.
True Confession Time
The power of isolation to shape human experience and identity is a common theme in island novels, for obvious reasons—and it is one to which I’m particularly drawn now, as a solo parent, for slightly less obvious ones.
Introvert that I am, I’ve always enjoyed my own company and frankly, am rather looking forward to having an empty nest someday. Not because I don’t love my children more than anything, but simply because I’ve never lived alone and I suspect I’ll really dig it. The idea of complete freedom, quiet, and order—basically, the antithesis of the family life I’m living now—is extremely attractive. The idea of inviting another adult to take up residence in my would-be empty nest is much less so.
That said, solo parenthood has shown me just how terrifyingly easy it is to lose sight of yourself without the mirror only a fellow adult human can hold up, day in and day out. In the eyes of my children, I see myself as they see me—as the constructor of sandwiches, the reader of bedtime stories, the annoyingly persistent reminder to floss. I am the purveyor of constant, unconditional love and the occasional freshly-baked cookie, nothing more or less.
I can train them to ask me about my day when they’re done telling me about theirs, as a matter of politeness. I can crack them up by showing them pictures of myself at their ages. I can help them to imagine my perspective, that of the one who just washed the floor, when they run in through the kitchen with muddy shoes. But I can’t engender genuine curiosity in them about who I am as a person who just happens to be their mother.
I don’t really want to; I know they’ll relate to me as a fellow adult when they’re adults too, someday, and that’s just as it should be. But knowing that doesn’t make it feel any less isolating to be the only adult in the house right now. That’s what friends are for. And books. I don’t know where I’d be without them.