Gavin Francis (2020) Island Dreams: Mapping an Obsession.

Gavin Francis tells us of his love affair with islands and maps. And he traces his addiction to a district library in Fife he visited as a child aged eight or nine. How his little fingers traced patterns over atlas and archipelagos ‘as if reading Braille’. As an adult he had to choose between studying medicine, or becoming a geographer. A romantic notion to which I say, you’re a fucking liar, but hey, we all tell fibs. It’s how you tell them that matters.

He quotes John Berger’s description of Gigha, ‘A  uterus leading to the western sky’.  That alone makes it worth reading and his account of his odysseys of island hopping to a more sedate existence and medical practice in the centre of Edinburgh (you need serious money to live there) is knowledgeable, in an easy-to-read style, which isn’t as easy as it sounds.

‘A fair summary of what I’m attempting here: a simple and sincere cartography of my own obsession with the twinned but opposing allures of island and city, of isolation and connection’.

Here’s island life as an ideal.

W.B. Yeats, small lake island in County Sligo.

The lake-island of Innisfree

‘I will arise and go now, go to Innisfree. And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow.’

But be warned, like ye old maps of here be dragons, island life such as the year spent as a warden on Unst, with the gannet colony overlooking the Muckle Flugga, must be chosen or it becomes a prison. Francis tells us that ‘isolate comes from the Italian word isolare: to make an island.

‘We have the unnecessary and foolish word: isolate.’

Eleven autobiographical chapters with overlapping themes end in Island Dreams. Islands simplify life and there is the commonality of escaping the clock and finding time. Finding yourself and where you’re meant to be. Often thrown back into a different century.

In Letters From an Island, Louise Mac Niece, wrote of his gaiety at having come north, running away from the south’s ‘cruel clocks’.

Francis visits Inchcolm (Holy Isle) Iona of the East, Bass Rock (Prison Isle) and  Inchkeith, Edinburgh’s leprosarium that shows the tick-tock of choosing and being chosen sometimes by God, sometimes by man and cruel nature. No vehicles. No phones. No radio. A falling back on yourself. A revelation of your real nature.

James IV experiment on Inchkeith was ostensibly for a higher purpose, to reveal the language of angels. (I’m sure I read a book with that title.) The first Scottish and English king ordered his lower subjects to take a mute woman to Inchkeith, to give her two orphan children, and provide her with everything she needed. He wanted to discover what language the children would speak when they were old enough to have perfect speech. ‘Some sources said they spoke good Hebrew, but I did not know any reliable sources for these claims’.

In the realms of higher ideals, there are always casualties and it’s always the poor that suffer most, first and last.

Francis uses the ‘precious one’ Rinpoche and Lama of Shey on the Crystal Mountains of Himalaya as an exemplar of being and belonging. The Rinpoche whose body is twisted with arthritis has an acolyte but spends his days in a cell looking out into the diamond light of the Crystal Mountains which he has not left in eight years and is unlikely to ever do so.

‘Of course I’m here,’ the Lama said. ‘Especially when I have no choice.’  

Author of The Snow Leopard, Peter Matthiessen makes much of the Rimpoche’s laughter and good humour, but italicises ‘Especially’. To choose is to be chosen and all is right in the world.

Francis makes much of the Rinpoche’s choice too. It contains in it the paradox of letting go and freely choosing unchoosing. Ironically, in an act of synchronicity, I was also reading The Snow Leopard when I was reading Francis’s book about the lure of island and city life. Books he tells us are also kind of islands, I often choose. Matthiessen’s journey is a Vintage Classic. Island Dreams: Mapping an Obsession is entertaining but neither vintage nor a classic. There’s no shame in that. The Precious One might be perfect, but the rest of us plodders…Read on.