It would have been more appropriate to read it in the winter, of course, but I decided to pick it up a few days ago, in the heat of summer. I quickly remembered the people from the earlier book: Flora is the main character, although I found her rather featureless and immature. Her boyfriend Joel is a high-powered American lawyer, who comes from a seriously traumatic childhood and carries around a lot of negative self-esteem. I didn’t much like him.
Flora’s best friend Lorna is a teacher; she’s a little more likeable than Flora, but in this book she can’t stop thinking about Dr Saif, a Muslim refugee who lives in the Scottish island of Mure where these novels are set. Dr Saif has two sons who are slowly integrating into the community, but has no idea what happened to his wife. He fears the worst, but still loves her, and doesn’t want to get involved with anyone else while there is any hope at all.
There are many other characters, too, most of whom I vaguely recalled from ‘The Endless Beach’. Their stories interleave nicely as the novel progresses, some of them quite poignant. There’s an ongoing story about how Saif and his sons adapt to a very Western (and chilly) Christmas, something they have never previously celebrated. There’s a story about Flora, who discovers something early in the book that worries Joel immensely.
There are also much more serious storylines: the ongoing search for Saif’s wife, for instance, leads to a quite traumatic scene in Glasgow. And there’s Colton, the gay multi-millionaire who is dying, attended by his husband, Flora’s brother Fintan. Colton’s brother arrives, bringing some antagonism and politics, and a bit of conflict.
Although I couldn’t really relate strongly to any of the characters, and found many of them quite two-dimensional, I l found the book very readable. The plotting is good, and the pace just right (in my view).
Having said that, there were some irritations. I don't mind the informal style, but in at least two places I found lengthy sentences that didn’t make sense at all, no matter how many times I tried to unravel them. Some proofreading should have spotted those. One of them said, grammatically speaking, the opposite of what it was evidently supposed to say.
Then there’s a bedroom scene which doesn’t feel entirely realistic in the way it happens, out of the blue in unlikely circumstances when two people suddenly decide they need to ‘get together’. And then there’s considerably more detail than I could want.
My other gripe about the book is the child Agot, the four-year-old daughter of one of Flora’s other brothers. There’s clearly something very wrong with Agot: she doesn’t appear to have any conversation appropriate to a child her age, but every so often she yells, at full volume, with speech patterns like those of a child of around two. I wondered if she was supposed to have Down Syndrome; if not that, she must have some other learning disability: but it’s not mentioned at all. I had been puzzled about it in the earlier book and hoped that it might be addressed as another storyline from this book. But it wasn’t. Perhaps it’s covered in the book which I haven’t read, that takes place before ‘The Endless Beach’.
‘An Island Christmas’ ends in a bittersweet way, tying up some of the threads of the story, seeing some conflicts resolved. Yet there are still some open questions so I wasn’t surprised to learn that there’s a sequel to this, although not yet published. So I will probably have to get hold of that…
Review copyright 2020 Sue's Book Reviews
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