There is something about an island that stirs the imagination. Or, in any case, it seems to stir mine.
A few years ago, on a trip to the Côte de Granit Rose in Brittany, I walked along seaweed-strewn sands towards one of the many tidal islands dotted along that coastline. As I approached I noticed that on the nearest island, there was a tiny house – a single cottage, all alone – and I felt a familiar prickle running up my spine, the shrinking of the scalp that tells me to pay attention, that there’s something here: the beginning of a story.
My new novel is set on a tidal island. This fictional island of Eris, located somewhere off the west coast of Scotland, also boasts a single house: mine is inhabited by Vanessa, an artist who has 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 I saw the island in Brittany: although I knew I wanted to write about an artist, the particulars of her character were shaped by the landscape she chose to live in. When I looked at that little house on the tidal island in Brittany, what interested me was the sort 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 very nearly 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 abortive attempt at landing, the pilot announced he would be diverting to Inverness. The disappointment was still settling when the clouds broke, offering a tantalising glimpse of green, and through that slender window we descended to Stornoway.
That’s the attraction of an island – it’s hard to get to. Hard to leave. That’s the point of them – or at least it feels that way to me. And it certainly seems to be the case for writers and artists in search of a space to create. When George Orwell went to Jura in the 1940s, he chose to venture to – in his words – “an extremely un-get-atable place”. Barnhill, the house in which he wrote 1984, sits at the very northern end of the island, reachable from the mainland only by taking two ferries, driving for 40 miles and then walking a further four along a dirt track. If anyone was going to disturb him while he was there, they’d really have to want to.
Tove Jansson, creator of the Moomins, also relished extreme unreachability. Every summer, for a period of 18 years, Jansson travelled by boat to Klovharun, an island on the Finnish archipelago, “a rock in the middle of nowhere” in the words of her niece. Jansson would leave for the island as soon as the ice broke in April and would remain there, without running water or electricity, often for months.
In an age of convenience and connection, it seems almost unthinkable to venture so far – I’d balk at having to catch and gut fish for supper – but there is something irresistible in the idea of living in a place so unwatched and unjudged, utterly disconnected, where one might live free from even the possibility of trivial distractions.
Reading about the lives of artists as I researched my book, it occurred to me that the urge to flee seemed particularly prevalent among women. Not uniquely to islands, but to remote places: Winifred Nicholson’s creative practice flourished on her visits to Skye and South Uist, Agnes Martin and Georgia O’Keeffe found themselves in New Mexico, the Scottish painter Joan Eardley produced her best work in the tiny fishing village of Catterline.
Listening 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 for most of her life. Speaking about Carrington’s glorious, dreamlike Self-Portrait, in which the artist is portrayed sitting in a chair, a hyena at her side, while outside the window a white horse runs across a field, 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 have to bolt.”
Times have changed. Women no longer need to travel to the ends of the earth to make art, but then the pull 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,” O’Keeffe said of New Mexico, “that was my country. I’d never seen anything like it before, but it fitted to me exactly… The sky is different, the wind is different. I shouldn’t say too much about it, because other people may be interested, and I don’t want them to be interested.”
When I travel to islands and when I conjure them in my imagination, I think part of what I’m doing is searching for a place of belonging. As Judith Schalansky, author of the marvellous Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands, writes: “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 fervour of colonialism, but through yearning for it.”
An island offers seclusion and the illusion of possession. It offers a kind of containment, too, the possibility of an entire ecosystem existing on one small piece of land, a place over which a single person, even a lone female, might have dominion.
It’s a fantasy, of course. The remote islands that Schalansky writes about in hers are not idylls but “unsettling, barren places whose riches lay in the multitude of terrible events that had befallen them”. Fictional islands are rarely better, from Amity to my own Eris, they tend to be beautiful places where awful things befall inhabitants 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 body of work, but her untethering comes at a price. Without socialisation, you become wild. Without regular exposure to people, you find them harder to read. Cues 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 innocuous.
On my birthday trip to Lewis, I walked along the crumbling cliffs above Mangersta beach, clinging in places to the sheep fence for fear of disappearing over the edge. I marched into 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. In defiance of the season, the white sands and rolling dunes were almost deserted. Around dusk on my last evening, I walked along a lonely road that winds, aimlessly – or so it seemed – across the headland above the farm where I was staying. The landscape up there is treeless and bleak, a plateau of boulder and peat bog that extends for miles before falling abruptly away into the Atlantic Ocean.
You can see for miles, and in all the time I was walking, I saw no one. I’m not sure I even saw a sheep. I felt peaceful, and happy.
And afraid.
My mind started to turn, as it seems to do when I find myself in lonely places, to murder. I started to think about what I would do if something happened, if someone were to emerge (unlikely, I know, out of the peat bog) and attack me.
I would run, I thought. Pick up a big rock. Fight.
Lose, probably.
I told an interviewer once that I needed fear to write: at the time I was thinking about the fears that had driven me (of failure, debt, disappointing expectations), but now I think it perhaps runs a little deeper than that – that being afraid stirs 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’d spend my nights listening for the creak on the stair; I’d never sleep.
I suppose I’d 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
