10 Books to mark ...
Saturday is the anniversary of the publication of Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe. Here are 10 other great novels about islands and the sea.
THE CORAL ISLAND
R M Ballantyne
Edinburgh-born Ballantyne spent some years working for the Hudson Bay company in Canada, where he learned about the harsher side of life. Though he never visited the South Seas islands on which his novel for children is based, he made sure his tale of shipwrecked boys contained “plenty of gore and violence” to keep them amused.
LORD OF THE FLIES
William Golding
Also has plenty of violence, but of a more profoundly disturbing kind, as Golding pitches his marooned class of schoolboys on a remote island, where primitive instincts and civilised values fight it out.
TREASURE ISLAND
Robert Louis Stevenson
Like Golding, RLS was inspired by The Coral Island. Jim Hawkins’s intrepid adventures in the company of the scary but fascinating Long John Silver and his search for a horde of long-lost treasure remain evergreen.
WHISKY GALORE
Compton Mackenzie
Based on the true story of the shipment of whisky that in 1941 was wrecked off Eriskay and rescued by islanders before it could be impounded by the Home Guard, this has become a comic classic and coloured many a reader’s view of the typical Scottish islander.
ISLAND OF WINGS
Karin Altenberg
A story of a marriage, set on St Kilda in 1830. When the minister arrives with his new and pregnant wife, it is soon his relationship that is more in need of saving than the islanders’s immortal souls.
SHUTTER ISLAND
Dennis Lehane
Written as a gothic homage to the likes of the Bronte sisters, with many a nod to the same genre of films, Lehane’s creepy mystery is set in the 1950s when the disappearance of a patient in a hospital for the criminally insane leads investigating officers to make unsettling discoveries.
DEATH OF A RIVER GUIDE
Richard Flanagan
Recounted by the Tasmanian narrator Aljaz, as he is drowning, it’s the story of his family’s dark, violent past which mirrors the history of the island’s persecuted aboriginal population over the centuries.
WIDE OPEN
Nicola Barker
Set on the Isle of Sheppey, its characters are all at sea, from the “lost” eight-year-old to the man whose profession is join- the-dots pornography. Barker’s eery world view is perfect for this setting and its unhappy drifters.
TO THE LIGHTHOUSE
Virginia Woolf
The Scottish island on which the lighthouse stands is more a motif than a setting. Told in three parts, it takes place over several years, as recounted by one of the young friends of the complicated, charismatic Mrs Ramsay, whose summer holiday house was once filled with guests and life.
A HIGH WIND IN JAMAICA
Richard Hughes
Considered the precursor of Lord Of The Flies, Hughes’s account of what happens to the Victorian children of a Jamaica planter who fall into the hands of pirates remains shocking, not only for its casual cruelty, but especially for its acknowledgement that children can be calculating, murderous and cold.