FICTION Paradise lost
is reeled in by a rough-edged new take on the Swiss Family Robinson story
Mr Peacock’s Possessions By Lydia Syson Zaffre, 432 pages, £12.99
Lydia Syson’s fine novel is The Swiss Family Robinson for adults. Like Johann Wyss’s book, it follows the fortunes of a family living in isolation on a remote island, but it explores ideas that find no place in the 19th-century children’s classic. In the 1870s, the Peacocks have been drifting around the Pacific, from New Zealand to Samoa, for several years, driven ever onwards by the restlessness of Mr Peacock. He yearns for a place that he can call entirely his own, where he is unfettered by the rules of others. He finds it in an uninhabited island in Oceania.
Delivered there by a trading ship, the family struggles to turn it into the Eden they originally envisaged. Another passing ship, one of the very few to visit, brings them six young missionary-educated Polynesian workmen to help with their labours. On the very day they arrive, the eldest Peacock son, Albert, a sensitive teenage boy who has enraged his father by his lack of enthusiasm for the island project, goes missing. Has he suffered some fatal accident? Has he stowed away on the departing ship? Days and weeks pass and there is no explanation of Albert’s fate. Meanwhile, his spirited sister Lizzie finds an ally in Kalala, one of the newcomers. Together they explore the island and gradually uncover two terrible secrets.
As Mr Peacock’s vision of a potential paradise disintegrates, both Lizzie and Kalala are forced, in different ways, to question their beliefs about the people whose lives have shaped their own. Innocence is cruelly lost but new hopes emerge from the island’s tragedies.
Syson’s novel is richly evocative of a Pacific world in flux, as cultures clash and individuals battle to find their place amid the ensuing confusion. It’s also a very moving story of fathers and children, of faith and disillusion, and of the dangerous consequences of trying to take possession of people as well as land.