Book Review | The Visitors by Simon Sylvester

Nobody moves to the remote Scottish island of Bancree, and few leave—but leaving is exactly what seventeen-year-old Flora intends to do. So when a mysterious man and his daughter move into isolated Dog Cottage, Flo is curious. What could have brought these strangers to the island? The man is seductively handsome but radiates menace; and there's something about his daughter Ailsa that Flo can't help but feel drawn towards.

People aren't only arriving on Bancree—they are disappearing too. Reports of missing islanders fill the press and unnerve the community. When a body washes ashore, suspicion turns to the strange newcomers on Dog Rock.

Convinced of their innocence, Flo is fiercely determined to protect her friend Ailsa. Could the answer to the disappearances, and to the pull of her own heart, lie out there, beyond the waves?

***

A contemporary twist on an old fisherman's myth complete with an immensely atmospheric setting, a strong yet sympathetic central character and a missing persons mystery that'll keep you guessing till all is said and done—and then some—The Visitors by Simon Sylvester has everything including the girl going for it.

For all it has to offer, Bancree has seen better days. As a remote island off the coast of Scotland—bleakly beautiful, to be sure, but truly brutal too—it and its inhabitants have been hit hard by the economy's catastrophic collapse. "There was nothing on the island that wasn't already dying. Half the houses were for sale. The island population numbered only a few hundred, and that dripped away, year on year." (p.5)

Little wonder, as the only booming business on Bancree is whisky, and Lachlan Crane, the son set to inherit the local distillery, is at best "a bully and a womaniser," (p.36) and at worst? Well. Time will tell. For him and for Flo.

Said seventeen-year-old has no intention of taking a job at the Clachnabhan factory when she finishes her final year. She'll be leaving home just as soon as is humanly—like her former boyfriend, who beats her to it at very the beginning of The Visitors. A whipsmart character from the first, Flo knows that Richard isn't the love of her life; still, she feels defeated when he makes a break for the mainland:

Going out with him was an escape—my route to freedom, a cord that connected me to the world outside. Richard had cut that cord, and I felt robbed and hollow, the cavern of my stomach writhing with tiny, wormy things. Frustration, envy, sadness. It should have me who'd escaped into a new life, drinking in bars and meeting new people. It should have been me doing the breaking up. The dumping. (p.83)

One way or the other, the deed is done, and for a moment, Flo is alone; as alone as she's ever been, at least. Then she makes a friend.

Book Review | The Brides of Rollrock Island by Margo Lanagan

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On remote Rollrock Island, men go to sea to make their livings — and to catch their wives.

The witch Misskaella knows the way of drawing a girl from the heart of a seal, of luring the beauty out of the beast. And for a price a man may buy himself a lovely sea-wife. He may have and hold and keep her. And he will tell himself that he is her master. But from his first look into those wide, questioning, liquid eyes, he will be just as transformed as she. He will be equally ensnared. And the witch will have her true payment.

Margo Lanagan weaves an extraordinary tale of desire, despair, and transformation. With devastatingly beautiful prose, she reveals characters capable of unspeakable cruelty, but also unspoken love.

***

On our first sight of the sea-witch Misskaella, who haunts the shore of Rollrock Island, she's "sat exactly halfway between tideline and water, as if she meant to catch the lot of us." (p.3)

So fantasise the fearful children, at least, to whom the haggard old crone at the broken heart of this bitterly beautiful book represents "the face of our night-horrors, white and creased and greedy." (p.5) That would be the exact reaction Misskaella, in her more maudlin moments, mean to elicit, but her position, perched on a boulder on this borderline - with a foot on the land and a fin in the froth - signifies something else. It speaks of a love lost, and a life divided: two of the core concerns of Margo Lanagan's hypnotic new novel.

Initially, admittedly, this prologue is almost incomprehensible. But return to it - as I did immediately after finishing The Brides of Rollrock Island's masterful last chapter - and its intent is resonant, as pure and cold and clear as the godforsaken sea.

Of course, the old witch was young once, and it is the tall tale of her horrid origins that properly sets off this year's best contender. To begin with, wee Misskaella is an innocent, but the last of the litter's little life takes a dark turn when her dying grandmam comments cruelly on her "miscast" (p.16) appearance.

"Her face was all dismay, looking at me. My hand came up to touch my nose and mouth, but they were only the same nose and mouth I had always had; there was nothing new or monstrous about them." (ibid)

Indeed not. Yet nevertheless, Misskaella knows now that something - some strange quirk of chemistry - sets her apart from the island's other young 'uns, and hot on the heels of this question, an answer, for it seems she has some of the seal in her. Some sympathetic power over selkie-kind. Out of blubbery sea-skins Misskaella can call beautiful, wondrous women, and so she does in later life, for a substantial sum — though this is a twisted sort of torture to her, still all ugly and utterly unloved.

"And now I saw a seal-girl's face, straight on and lamp-lit, for the first time. Not quite human, she was all the more beautiful for that. Her dark features sat in the smooth skin like a puzzle of stones and shells; I wanted to look and look until I had solved it." (p.126) 

In time, taking a sea-wife for a bride becomes a tradition on the island, as unspeakable as it is irresistible. This progressively gentles Rollrock's men, and drives away all other comers, frustrated and enraged. Cannily, Lanagan moves away from Misskaella at this stage, so that the reader may see the slope become slippery through the eyes of a number of neat narrators, including a woman blithely betrayed by her husband and son; a young man who abandons his fiery fiance for the "straightness and [...] strangeness" (p.160) of a submissive selkie temptress; and a boy whose love for his mam knows no bounds, and whose mam's love for the sea acknowledges no bond — a mother and son whose actions will change the course of many more souls than their own.

The Brides of Rollrock Island builds and builds and builds in this way, brilliantly I dare say, until it ends — and just as well, because by then my emotions were about to spill over. I've not been more moved by a book in years.

In part, that's thanks to its unsettling subject matter, which is to say the systematic corruption of those all too human ideals of beauty and purity... though the author is never so crass as to say so in such terms. In fact, very little of Lanagan's latest is explicit - The Brides of Rollrock Island's soaring success is all in the implication - such that one must work at an understanding.

This question of accessibility is a moderate obstacle - I fear Lanagan's lyrical language will be too much for some, and too little for others - but only then at the outset. Indeed, ease of entry into the folksy fairy-tale before us is mirrored by the opening up of Rollrock's initially forbidding front face, as espied by a lady from the mainland:

"The island rose from the horizon. It looked like nothing so much as a giant slumped seal itself, the head towards us and the bulk lumping up behind, trailing out northeast to the tail. Its slopes were greened over, its near side all cliffs and cliff pieces, chewed off but not swallowed by the sea. Every cove and cave looked alike inaccessible to me, most treacherous and unwelcoming.

"But we did not head for that rough bit of coast as we drew nearer; instead we bore westward and around the head there, and once beyond that I could see where the land lowered itself more gently, making room for a town, a small town only, on the slopes above the two long moles built out from the shore." (pp.279-80)

As above, so below. Certainly there is a peculiar poetry to Lanagan's prose: a power - all her own - over those who push through the opaque prologue, and with my every word I would urge you to do exactly that. Other than the lackluster cover, there's nothing not to love about The Brides of Rollrock Island. It's a wistful book, but wondrous. It will break your heart, and remake it.

Surrender yourself, then, to Margo Langan's mesmerising new novel. Allow it to surround you like a shimmering second skin... finer, fuller, and freer, finally, than the first. The Brides of Rollrock Island is all that and then some.

... 

This review originally appeared, in a slightly altered form, on tor.com.

***

The Brides of Rollrock Island

by Margo Lanagan

UK Publication: February 2012, David Fickling Books
US Publication: September 2012, Knopf Books

Buy this book from

Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com

IndieBound / The Book Depository

Or get the Kindle edition

Recommended and Related Reading

Film Review: Ondine

There's nothing quite like a good fable. And on the outside, Ondine has all the aspects of such a thing: timeless, charming and innocent, it tells the tale of a fisherman eking out an existence in a coastal Irish village. Syracuse has been off the booze that destroyed his marriage for a few years now, but sobriety hasn't transformed his life like some catch-all cure. He remains a poor and lonely man, struggling against his demons, his daughter the only thing that keeps him on the straight and narrow track. But Annie is stricken with kidney disease, and her alcoholic mother, whom she lives with, has taken up with a dodgy Scottish bloke. Aren't they all?

Things take a turn when one day, while out on the boat trawling through the ocean for his daily fish, Syracuse finds - much to his surprise - a beautiful girl in his nets. When she comes to she introduces herself as Ondine, and insists that he not take her to the hospital. Grudgingly, Syracuse hides Ondine away in his late mother's ramshackle cottage, but Annie, inquisitive little creature that she is, soon discovers her father's secret: a selkie, she believes; a mythical seal-creature who has left her skin in the sea to spend seven years and seven tears on Syracuse.

 

As Annie, newcomer Alison Barry is lumbered with the larger part of Ondine's mythical underpinnings. Having checked out all the local library's books on the subject, she acts as the mouthpiece for all the fantastic aspects of the film, explaining the history and practices of selkies - a thankless role, you might think, yet Barry steals the show. This little girl is a revelation: heartbreakingly brave during dialysis sessions, wonderfully witty in her exchanges with Ondine and a smart foil for Colin Farrell's struggling fisherman. She is singularly the most impressive aspect of Neil Jordan's latest film.

Which isn't to say Ondine doesn't have a whole lot more going for it. Farrell, too, impresses, turning in a more low-key performance than he's become known for without losing that quirky charisma that makes him such a pleasure to watch. Stephen Rea is hilariously dry as Syracuse's embittered priest. As the selkie herself, Alicja Bachleda brings a quality of otherworldliness to Ondine that, were it lacking, would rob the film of much of its charm; she has a certain chemistry with Farrell, of course, though everyone's favourite Irish actor carries the load. Bachleda only truly sparkles around Alison Barry, the life and soul of this picture.

For the most part, Neil Jordan, directing from his own spare script, captures the gently devastating spirit of Ondine perfectly. This isn't his first brush with the fantastic, of course. In The Company of Wolves and Interview with the Vampire he proved himself up to the task of establishing an authentic tone, and he carries off the more subdued atmosphere of Ondine all the way through to the last act, when things sadly take an ill-advised turn. From the get-go you get the sense Syracuse will have to confront his demons at some point, but when the face-off occurs, it feels abrupt, and at odds with all that has come before. And then Jordan goes and explains the mechanics of his fable, diminishing with every unnecessary word the tantalising mystery of it all.

Luckily, Ondine recovers some of its allure in its last moments. Jordan doesn't quite squander all that he's worked towards, and his collaborators are such an accomplished bunch that even at its lowest ebb, Ondine is a beautiful thing to behold. The cinematography throughout is exquisite, the timeless landscapes of green and grey a wonder of the natural world composed and shot just so; and the score... oh my. Between Sigur Ros, the woeful, wilting tones of one-time Damien Rice backing vocalist Lisa Hannigan and a host of others, Ondine sounds as out of this world as it looks.

I've been looking forward to Ondine since its first appearance on the festival circuit late last year, so I'm chuffed to bits to see so many of my hopes for it realised. The intrusion of reality on a narrative so purposefully set apart from the undiscerning brutality of the world rather takes the edge off any proclamations of unqualified greatness, but there is, at the end of the day, a great deal about this film to love: from its restrained tone to Alison Barry's stellar performance, from its unforgettable aesthetics to their superlative aural accompaniment. This is a fantastic fable, all told, momentarily misguided but otherwise breathtaking from end to end.