I had never read anything by Victoria Hislop, although two or three friends had recommended her books to me. Even when I saw a couple of the books on a church stall, I hesitated, as they looked long and perhaps a bit heavy. But I decided to try them, although it’s taken me nearly three years to pick one of them up to read.
(Amazon UK link)
The one I chose was ‘The Island’, although I had no idea what it was about. Apparently it was the author's debut novel. It starts with a brief prologue set in 1953 as a young woman heads to a leper colony. An unexpected opening, and one which didn’t really make sense until much later in the book - but it certainly piqued my curiosity.
The story then moves to 2001, in the same location (Plaka - a seaside resort on the Greek island of Crete). A young woman called Alexis is on a boat, being taken to the deserted small island of Spinalonga, which was formerly a leper colony. Evidently there’s a connection with the prologue, but we don’t actually see much of Alexis, although she seems like an interesting person.
Alexis, we quickly learn, is on a mission to discover her family roots. She was being brought up in the UK by a Greek mother and English academic father, but her mother has said very little about her past. She’s changed the subject when asked, but now Alexis is grown up her mother has accepted that her daughter wants to know - and she’s written a letter to an old friend whom she’s sure is still alive. Alexis has travelled to Crete with a boyfriend, but is on her own in her explorations, uncertain whether or not she wants to continue her relationship.
The bulk of the story takes place in the past, beginning in 1939. It’s as if told to Alexis by her mother’s friend, and I was, at first, disappointed: I’d like to have learned more about Alexis herself. And the story from the past is, in places, quite sordid. It starts with Eleni, a teacher from Plaka, who has found some leprous patches on her body. So she has to leave her husband and teenage daughters, and go into exile, to Spinalonga. She will see her husband again from a distance, as part of his job is to take supplies, by boat, to Spinalonga. But she won’t be able to touch him, or to return - in those days, there was no cure for the disease.
I read about the reality of Spinalonga on Wikipedia and elsewhere, after I’d finished the book, and it seems that Victoria Hislop rather glossed over some of the horrors of the situation. We see Eleni move into a small, almost empty hut, but she’s a positive person: she adopts a boy who had to leave his family too, for the same reason, and she does all she can to brighten their lives. The tragedies of separations are shown, and the difficulties of adjusting; but we see very little of the starkness and filth that, apparently, was part of this colony for some years.
It’s a thought-provoking, often moving novel that helped me understand how leprosy could affect ordinary people, and how, even in the 20th century, it still carried a terrible stigma. Most of the story is about the island and its people; while Alexis gets her answers, and learns about her family, there’s a great deal of extra story which sets the scene and shows the background (albeit in a somewhat rose-coloured way) and it took me a while to work out exactly who were Alexis’s relatives. We don’t discover anything about her mother until much later in the book - and that’s quite a sordid, shocking part of the story, mostly unrelated to leprosy.
It was perhaps a mistake to start reading this book in a period when I was very busy with visiting family; the book wasn’t so gripping that I wanted to pick it up at every available moment, so I mostly only read for twenty minutes or so each evening, and my mind was so full I often had to look back a few pages to remind myself of what was happening.
Overall, however, it’s a very readable book. I thought it extremely well written, and it painted a vivid picture of a situation and lifestyle I knew nothing about. I’m sure the overall story will stay with me for a long time - and I look forward to reading other books by this author in future.
1 comment:
I'll see if our local library has a copy.
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