The Island House by Mary Considine (2022)

While travelling in southwest England in June I naturally visited every bookshop I saw. As I did not have room in my luggage for many books I made a note of possible titles for the blog, planning to order them once I returned home. But leafing through this book I suddenly read: "The Atkins sisters" and realized it was a book about their island. Of course I just had to buy it at once. 

As a child Mary Considine, with her family, spent many summers on Looe island, then owned by Evelyn (known as Attie) and Babs Atkins. Later she becomes part of their "shifting army of helpers". Having only read Evelyn's description of life on the island I found it interesting to read about Mary's experiences. It sounds like Babs and Evelyn weren't the easiest people to get along with. They fiercely guarded their privacy and discouraged any visitors to their home: "The sisters, in their fortress, were all-powerfull, fascinating, alarming. Attie, the elder sister, and author of bestseller We Bought an Island - signed copies available in the craft shop - was larger than Babs, more aloof, increasingly only sporadically involved in wider island life. They sported matching grey perms and glasses, but Attie's shrewd eyes were magnified behind thicker lenses, and her mood was always unpredictable. Babs, ten years younger, and not long retired from her teaching career, seemed to us the practical one, who handled bookings for helpers and holidaymakers and met everyone who set foot here. Attie, the nickname from her wartime stint in the WRNS, had been the driving force behind their move to the island in the sixties: ten or twenty or thirty years later, she still wielded powerful charm and was given to expansive passions." When Mary's mother, a well-regarded poet with many publications and prizes to her name, produced a book of island-based poems, dedicated to the sisters, they maintained a stony silence until she finally asked what they thought. "Not a very happy choice, was the frosty response. There was only space for one writer on the island".

Years later Mary and her partner Patrick live in London. They buy a cottage in Looe, the same house the Atkins sisters first bought when they came to Cornwall. After a difficult time with infertility treatment, IVF and Mary's father's illness and death they feel a need to commit to Cornwall full-time (Patrick can work from home). They apply to "island sit"while the regular wardens go on holiday, and they get the job. They love it and the Cornwall Wildlife Trust allows them to live permanently in Island House. This is five years after Babs' death. The plan is "for us to renovate the house, sympathetically (it is unlisted) and with as much use of "green" technology as possible, in return for a long lease. (...) I kept wondering what Babs and Attie would have thought: of their house being lived in by other people, of those other people being me and my husband. I wondered if Babs would haunt me."

Mary and Patrick move to the island and start on the renovations. With the weather being very unpredictable, transport to the the island proves difficult. They employ builders and also get a lot of help from family and friends. They keep pigs, chickens and bees and have a fairly successful vegetable patch. Mary dreams of flowers and buys lots of plants. "The trembling plants are doomed by my relentless optimism, by the gleeful snails, and most of all by the wind, careering in from the south-east with salt in its mouth to burn and wither almost everything I plant."

They don't seem to get on with boats and machinery. When they try out their first boat the engine fails and they only just manage to return to the island. Other boats don't last long and the range cooker, generator, wind turbine and quad bike all give them endless trouble.

 

 

After their first winter, they settle "into the good life, chipping away at painting the outside walls (...), fine-tuning the electrical and water systems, scrubbing old slate floors and making endless fixes to the house. Patrick and Justin's (Patricks business partner) business is still in its infancy and money is tight, but we're not worried yet. We are content with each other, our dog and cats, the sound of the gulls and the light on the water". Actually, I could not really tell if Mary was really happy on the island, living there seemed to come with a lot of stress.

After a few years Patrick (who is profoundly deaf and gets help from "hearing dog" Skip) develops health problems and for a while Mary is in and out of hospital. They realize they will have to leave the island. After a final Christmas party and a final summer they move to Devon, having spent 6,5 years on the island.

Mary has a tendency to jump from past to present and back again in her story, while mixing present and past tenses. This made for confusing reading. I wanted so much to like this book and found that I did not, I got stuck half way and had to force myself to finish it. I don't really know why. Evelyn's books seem to have been written as one long chat and could have done with some editing. Yet I found them fascinating. Mary probably put a lot of thought into her book and had the help of experts, and I find her book boring. If you have read the book, please let me know what you think.

 

My posts about Evelyn's books can be found here  and here