Island of Dreams

A Personal History of a Remarkable Place

Dan Boothby ( Picador, 320pp, £14.99, Oldie price £12.99)

TRAVEL WRITER Dan Boothby was gripped by the work of Gavin Maxwell when he first pulled down from a library shelf Raven Seek Thy Brother, the third volume in Maxwell’s famous otter trilogy that began with Ring

of Bright Water. Twenty years later, Boothby was offered his ‘dream job’ as caretaker at Kyleakin lighthouse on the Isle of Skye, where Maxwell had once lived in a lighthouse cottage.

The resulting book is, wrote Ariane Bankes in the Literary Review, the ‘story of an obsession’. Boothby’s childhood was spent in a hippie commune in Norfolk in the 1970s and, thought Bankes, ‘for a boy brought up on the fringes of society, it is not hard to see why Maxwell was the quintessential outsider’.

In the Scotsman, Brian Morton enjoyed Boothby’s take on the experience. ‘His grouchy, loner’s tone strikes the perfect register for a book made in the footsteps of Maxwell. To describe his world-view, or perhaps his human-view, as jaundiced would be a gentle understatement,’ he wrote. When it comes to the magnetic ‘bleak glamour’ of Maxwell’s life and personality, Boothby finds among those Skye locals who remember him that ‘opinions are mostly negative’. But the island pulls him in and, wrote Nick Rennison in the Daily Mail, ‘his book is a lively, often funny tribute to the place and the people he meets there’. In the end, noted Rennison, ‘he seems to be rather less of a Maxwell nut but, at the very least, he has gained a new perspective on his obsession. Island of Dreams shows him emerging from the shadow of his hero to become a gifted writer himself.’

‘To describe his world-view, or perhaps

his human-view, as jaundiced would be a gentle understatement’