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10th January 2008 : SpinalongaIsland.info's review of the novel
The
Island
written by Victoria Hislop and published in 2005.
Victoria Hislop's first novel was published during summer 2005
and after being picked for Richard and Judy's Book Club it topped
the UK paperback fiction lists the following year. By 2007 it
was available in many languages including Greek in which it translates
as Toh Neesi.
The story follows a modern English woman, Alexis, who travels
to Crete to trace her mother's hidden past, one which she discovers
is intertwined with the history of the leper community that was
housed on the nearby island of Spinalonga. It has a sprawling
tapestry that takes in the bulk of the twentieth century, spanning
the second world war, the discovery of a cure for leprosy and
a young woman's questioning of family, life and love through her
discovery of her female lineage in the course of discussions with
the older residents of modern day Plaka.
It has topped the UK paperback bestseller list, been translated
for numerous markets and has fuelled its own brand of literary
tourism and interest in the history of the area. High literature
it may never be but it has certainly become a popular read and
one that has undoubtedly aided Plaka's continuing development
into a luxury holiday destination.
Although The
Island
is a work of fiction it has managed to subtly position itself
as a work so deeply rooted in a very specific location that it
cannot fail to have implicit quasi historical pretentions. Consequently
an objective reviewer would need to be devoid of any prior knowledge,
so perhaps at SpinalongaIsland.info we may have a slight disposition
towards being hypercritical and being male we're certainly not
typical of its mainly female readership. Spinalonga we find fascinating,
inspiring and enigmatic but our reading tastes don't really include
much beach reading of any kind.
The majority of readers may well jump on the description of this
work as 'beach reading' as too critical and dismissive, but it
doesn't negate the fact that this is a book that is probably best
read on one of the bay's beaches looking straight across towards
the island where many of its key scenes are purported to have
taken place.
In a way, however, this is where the novel falls down. It makes
no claims of depicting real characters but its characters and
scenes become somewhat stereotypical and cliched, almost a literary
hybrid version of the George Meris posters with blue and whitewashed
houses overlooking the Aegean. It's a sanitised and simplified
depiction of the Greek, and in this case Cretan, character. In
reading the novel it is too easy to suspect that the characters
have a heritage that is a cross between these Meris posters and
the pages of a Hardy novel instead of being products of the island
that was birthplace to Nikos Kazantsakis. There are other occasions
when the phraseology becomes stilted or falls into lazy simile.
The image of Alexis rolling the word 'Spinalonga' around in her
mouth like an olive seems to choose its words from the stock jar.
We are constantly told how noble or errant particular characters
are and the reader isn't really allowed to formulate their own
judgement. Instead, they become one dimensional caricatures of
good or less than honourable behaviour.
Obviously only the most elderly local inhabitants have true first
hand memories of the villages and the island during the inter-war
years but even Ms. Hislop's descriptions of the twenty first century
Plaka stray some distance from the truth. The scene where Alexis
boards the boat for her first crossing to the island is one that
is probably more 1971 than 2001, by which time modern tourism
already played a major role even in Plaka and the local taverna
had become a destination popular with the younger generations.
Perhaps one of the reasons that the novel lacks real substance
is that the story it tackles is too epic, a pan generational story
set against the backdrop of a misunderstood disease and an isolated
community. By necessity it becomes a montage of snapshot scenes
where characters don't have an opportunity to grow and mature.
Their behaviour is fixed into character from the moments of our
first meetings with each. As one reader described it, it is simply
a love story hung on a convenient location, romantic today but
with a suitably mysterious, tragic and yet still dignified past.
The only problem is that the location could be anywhere. The novel
fails to scratch the surface of the Cretan psyche and the characters
seem forever doomed to betray their creator's English heritage.
All this said, however, the novel and its author don't have overly
grand pretensions, this isn't a demanding work and may actually
be just the kind of light reading with a local twist that you
require for a holiday in the area.
The
Island is available in paoerback from Amazon.co.uk here,
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