Staying on the Rowena Farre - Seal Morning trail laid by Happy Camper Angela at our Endsleigh Salon evening on Pseudonyms last month, I eventually diverted off at a crossroads and read Island of Dreams - A Personal History of a Remarkable Place by Dan Boothby. Dan, you might recall, is the author who is pursuing the enigma that was Rowena Farre alias Daphne Macready and then I had chipped in with my Terry Nutkins anecdote (the dolphinarium, Oxford Street) and before we knew it there we were at Gavin Maxwell's Ring of Bright Water doorstep. Terry Nutkins had been one of the young boys who had lived on the island and cared for the otters, famously losing a finger when one of them turned on him.
With its themes of Scottish islands and living at one with the natural world Island of Dreams had seemed like a potential Orkney read when we go there later this year, but my interest couldn't wait that long. In the footsteps of one of his heroes, Dan Boothby follows the dream and his obsession with the life and times of Gavin Maxwell and takes the opportunity to live in Maxwell's former island home near the Isle of Skye.
By his own admission an unsettled and drifting wanderer who had never quite found the green-enough grass, it seemed like the realisation of all Dan Boothby's deepest-held dreams when an unpaid vacancy arose on the island to do some clearing up and tour guiding duties in return for Gavin Maxwell's roof over his head. As well as an account of hero-worship and the inevitable bursting of the bubble, Island of Dreams also offers an interesting and surprisingly objective overview (given the life-long adulation) of Gavin Maxwell's life, using both Douglas Botting's excellent biography and Dan Boothby's own thoughts and experiences. Surely any writer who has a myth placed upon them by their readers has much to live up to and is most likely to be found wanting
For a start the dream along with the island's peace and solitude seemed forever shattered by the presence of the new Skye road bridge, its massive stanchions (is that the right word) planted firmly on Lighthouse Island and carrying the road across the sea to Skye.
Gavin Maxwell would doubtless have had much to say about this, perhaps even using his aristocratic connections to do so at the highest level. His father had been a Baronet and Gavin Maxwell himself was educated at Stowe School in the 1920s...and now I'm wondering if he might have been there at the same time as TH White of The Goshawk fame, a teacher at Stowe, whose life was laid out in Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk...
Anyway I digress. Gavin Maxwell suffered a serious illness but did manage to train and serve with the SOE during the war. Famously that training was conducted at Spean Bridge in the Scottish highlands...sorry another diversion but this is what reading is all about surely.
We stopped at the Spean Bridge memorial when we travelled up to Orkney with the Tinker four years ago. It was a bit of a pilgrimage for him, one of those places held in great reverence by Royal Marines past and present around the world...
It is a vast and impressive landscape, tough and unforgiving, and the Tinker, having read all there was to know about the wartime SOE (Special Operations Executive) relished the chance to just be there, as did we...
Gavin Maxwell had been given Mijbil, his first otter, in 1956 whilst in Iraq which he brought home and proceeded to keep in his London flat before migrating to Lighthouse Island and setting up his 'sanctuary' there. By all accounts he was a desperately insecure man, those insecurities manifesting in an arrogance and need to control and Dan Boothby slowly builds up a truer picture of his hero. He advances an interesting theory based on the fact that many writers have experienced of a period in their lives that necessitated a protracted and enforced break in the routines of their formative years. Exiled from the world through illness perhaps, the interior imaginative life finds the time and space to expand and flourish beyond the norm...
I wondered what you all thought about that...
How many can we think of...
Gavin Maxwell's debilitating bout of Henoch-Schönlein Purpura, which commenced on his sixteenth birthday and caused ongoing bouts of internal bleeding necessitating bed rest, must have been a nightmare for an active young lad more used to the outdoor life.
On another branch line I am now thinking of Pilcrow by Adam Mars-Jones, a better fictional account of a debilitating illness and the consequent blooming of the imagination it would be harder to find. If you haven't read it I most certainly commend it to the house.
And so with the traffic thundering overhead and the rain pelting down by the bathful, Dan Boothby slowly explores his own nostalgia for a way of life he had never known, how it may have arisen in the first place, and in reaching his conclusions explores some interesting theories about reading per se...
'Literature can be a very intimate art form. The act of reading a book is a silent meeting of minds and sometimes a bond - a very powerful but always one-sided bond - takes place. Such a meeting is filled with artifice and impossibility.'
And to read at an impressionable age can have other unseen pitfalls which Dan Boothby acknowledges with great candour...
'As a teenager I imagined I had met Gavin Maxwell in his books. I fell in love with the idea of the kind of life that he and the boys lived and with the pictures he painted in my mind. I connected and I was seduced. But what I connected with was a carefully constructed version of himself. Compelling but also quite false...'
As I read Island of Dreams I dipped in and out of Douglas Botting's biography of Gavin Maxwell but have emerged with no real wish to revisit Ring of Bright Water yet again at the moment, however, if you haven't read them and are in need of a diversion, these three books would make a fascinating trilogy and Dan Boothby's book alone an excellent and enjoyable read.
Your thoughts about it all welcome and awaited as always...
And what about the authors who may have suffered that enforced separation from life for a while...
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