There is something about an island that sparks the imagination. Or, anyway, it seems to stir mine.
A few years ago, on a trip to the Côte de Granit Rose in Brittany, I walked on seaweed-strewn sand to one of the many tidal islands scattered along that coastline. As I approached, I noticed that on the nearest island there was a small house – a single cottage, all alone – and I felt a familiar prickle up my spine, the tingling of the scalp telling me to to notice that there something here: the beginning of a story.
My new novel is set on a tidal island. This fictional island of Eris, located somewhere on the west coast of Scotland, also boasts a single house: mine is inhabited by Vanessa, an artist who fled life in England in search of the space and silence to live as she pleases, unfettered by the constraints of marriage, family or society.
Vanessa came to life for me that day when I saw the island in Brittany: although I knew I wanted to write about an artist, the details of her character were shaped by the landscape in which she chose to live. When I looked up at that little house. the tidal island in Brittany, which interested me, was the kind of person who might choose to live there, at the mercy of the weather and the tide.
On my birthday this year I went to the Isle of Lewis – a flying visit that almost didn’t happen. The weather was poor the morning I flew, a blanket of low cloud hanging over the islands, and after 10 minutes of circling and one failed attempt to land, the pilot announced he would divert to Inverness. The disappointment was still settling when the clouds broke and offered a tantalizing glimpse of green, and through that slim window we descended towards Stornoway.
That’s the appeal of an island – it’s hard to get to. Hard to leave. This is the point of them – or at least it feels that way to me. And that certainly seems to be the case for writers and artists looking for a space to create. When George Orwell went to Jura in the 1940s, he chose to venture to – in his words – “a most inhospitable place”. Barnhill, the house in which he wrote 1984sits at the very northern tip of the island, accessible from the mainland only by taking two ferries, driving 40 miles and then walking a further four along a dirt road. If anyone was going to bother him while he was there, they’d have to really want to.
Tove Jansson, creator of the Moominsalso enjoyed the utmost inaccessibility. Every summer, for a period of 18 years, Jansson traveled by boat to Klovharun, an island in the Finnish archipelago, “a rock in the middle of nowhere” in the words of her cousin. Jansson would leave for the island as soon as the ice broke in April and would stay there, without running water or electricity, often for months.
In an age of convenience and connectivity, it seems almost unthinkable to venture that far – I don’t want to fish for dinner – but there’s something irresistible about the idea of living in a place so unwatched and unjudged, completely disconnected, where one can live free from even the possibility of trivial distractions.
As I read about the lives of artists while researching my book, it occurred to me that the urge to flee is especially prevalent among women. Not unique to islands, but to remote places: Winifred Nicholson’s creative practice flourished during her visits to Skye and South Uist, Agnes Martin and Georgia O’Keeffe found themselves in New Mexico, Scottish painter Joan Eardley produced her best work in the small fishing village of Catterline.
Listen to Katy Hessel’s Great Women Artists podcast, I was struck by Deborah Levy’s comments about Leonora Carrington, who left her home and family for London, then Paris, then Madrid and finally Mexico, where she settled and lived most of her life have. Talk about Carrington’s glorious, dreamlike Self portraitin which the artist is depicted sitting in a chair, a hyena at her side, while a white horse runs across a field outside the window, Levy says: “That white horse galloping outside the window is deeply felt . That’s what she wants. She wants to be that horse… What do you have to do to become an artist, especially of her generation? You must bolt.”
Times have changed. Women no longer had to travel to the ends of the earth to make art, but then the attraction of, say, the New Mexican desert was never just its isolation. Isolation may not even have been the main attraction, though it was certainly part of it. “As soon as I saw it,” said O’Keeffe of New Mexico, “it was my country. I’ve never seen anything like it, but it suited me exactly… The sky is different, the wind is different. I shouldn’t say too much about it because other people might be interested, and I don’t want them to be interested.”
When I travel to islands and when I conjure them up in my imagination, I think part of what I’m doing is searching for a place to belong. As Judith Schalansky, author of the wonderful Pocket Atlas of Outlying Islandswrites: “I had to make my discoveries in the library, driven by the desire to find … my own island: one that I would take possession of, not with the zeal of colonialism, but by longing for it.”
An island offers seclusion and the illusion of ownership. It also offers a kind of containment, the possibility of an entire ecosystem existing on one small piece of land, a place over which a single person, even a lone woman, may rule.
This is of course a fantasy. The remote islands that Schalansky writes about in her are not idylls but “unsettling, barren places whose wealth lay in the multitude of terrible events that befell them”. Fictional islands are rarely better, from Amity to my own Eris, they tend to be beautiful places where horrible things befall residents and visitors alike.
My own fictional artist is enchanted and inspired by her island and the solitude it offers her: Vanessa paints day and night, she creates an extraordinary work, but her dissolution comes at a price. Without socialization you become wild. Without regular exposure to people, you find them harder to read. Directions are missed, so when visitors come calling, motives are misunderstood, you miss what they really want from you. Acts of devotion seem suffocating, aggression is rendered harmless.
On my birthday trip to Lewis, I walked along the crumbling cliffs above Mangersta Beach, clinging to the sheep fence in places for fear of disappearing over the edge. I marched in gale-force winds across the glorious expanse of Uig Sands and, a little further along the coast, swam in the ice blue sea at Reef Beach. Despite the season, the white sands and rolling dunes were almost deserted. At dusk on my last night, I walked along a lonely road that wound aimlessly – or so it seemed – across the headland above the farm where I was staying. The landscape up there is treeless and dark, a plateau of rock and peat bog that stretches for miles before dropping abruptly into the Atlantic Ocean.
You can see for miles, and in all the time I’ve been walking, I haven’t seen anyone. I’m not sure I’ve even seen a sheep. I felt peaceful and happy.
And scared.
My mind began to turn, as it seems to when I find myself in lonely places, to murder. I began to think about what I would do if something happened, if someone (unlikely, I know, from the peat bog) emerged and attacked me.
I would run, I thought. Pick up a big rock. Fight.
Lose, probably.
I once told an interviewer that I needed fear to write: at the time I thought about the fears that drove me (of failure, guilt, disappointing expectations), but now I think it may lie a little deeper than this – that scares my imagination and that as much as I long for solitude, as much as I dream about the perfect lonely house on a remote island, I know that if I lived in one, I would spend my nights listen for the creak on the stairs; I would never sleep.
I guess I’ll just have to get up and write.
The Blue Hour by Paula Hawkins is published by Transworld at £22. Buy a copy for £18.70 from guardianbookshop.com
