From Robinson Crusoe onwards, the literary island is always a microcosm. Islands, the smaller and more isolated the better, offer novelists the conveniences of the closed room, the small scale; politics distilled to a manageable number of characters; the distance between cause and effect, behaviour and consequences, necessarily and usefully short. Strangers at the Port by Lauren Aimee Curtis, one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists, is set on an island where patriarchy has gone a little beyond realism – rather like Sophie Mackintosh’s The Water Cure, though it stops short of Mackintosh’s outright dystopia.
The island is unnamed but firmly located near Sicily by reference to The Odyssey and the Napoleonic War. The historical setting at first seems unsettled. Subsistence farming, homespun clothes and lo-tech living suggest a range of several centuries, and the vaguely archaic diction of the opening pages indicates earlier times. As the detail accumulates – a quarry, soldiers, a gramophone, a man in a yacht – it seems to imply a specific set of events off stage, but the narrative remains coy about its relationship to global affairs. The grape harvest fails. A prison colony comes and goes. At the end, the inhabitants emigrate to Australia on overcrowded and insanitary ships, at which point the well-informed reader might see that the story unfolds in the context of the phylloxera epidemic which destroyed the Mediterranean wine trade and triggered mass migration in the late 19th century.
There are several themes swirling here, none of them fully developed nor invested with urgency, and several narrative voices whose relationships are tense but unresolved. We begin with the childhood memories of Giulia, whose recollections are “shrouded in the mystery of childhood itself”. Giulia describes life on the island: a donkey, weather, fishermen, a gently erupting volcano seen across the water. The tone is desultory – we later realise that she’s writing on request and with reluctance – and much of her account is in a soporific past continuous tense. There’s a statement and then a sentence fragment, a run of description and then another statement and another fragment: “He was a king to us. A god … It was a lie, of course. A game.”
The older Giulia steps in at the beginning and end of each chapter, addressing someone she calls “Professor”, whose ideas about island life she corrects while protesting that her memories are fallible and unimportant. She describes a community that lives by fishing, farming and wine-making, controlled by men and especially by “the Shipmaster” and his nine sons, until the vines stop fruiting and their way of life collapses. There is a prison colony on the mountain and a stranger comes to town, but the islanders’ urge to scapegoat the prisoners comes to nothing much and the stranger doesn’t get involved.
The narrative passes to the stranger, “Archduke”, reluctant royalty seeking an escape from his responsibilities by sailing his yacht around the archipelago while remaining unable to imagine anything but almost absolute power for himself. He has illicit sex with some of the passing sailors, joins some rough parties on the beach, wonders vaguely why the harvest has failed and the islanders are leaving. We learn that his vanity extends to the self-publishing of shoddy books, the first about Venice and the latest a history of the island.
Strangers at the Port has the makings of a good novel. The setting is vivid, the island arid and inhospitable, a tough place for tough people. The relationship between Giulia, her mother and her sister is interestingly ambivalent. Giulia’s voice is engaging, though the lyrical beginning suggests a plot that doesn’t quite eventuate. The broken Archduke is a complex character, gesturing towards a study of misdirected or misunderstood male power in contrast to Giulia’s youth, poverty and limited experience. Curtis’s promise is evident. Her first novel, Dolores, was dark and intriguing and rightly prize-nominated. This one shows the same gifts, but it doesn’t quite come together as that book did.
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