Review: 'An Island'

©2023 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

An Island
By Karen Jennings
Literary Fiction
Hogarth

The notion of being alone or being connected has been prominent in several novels I've read recently. It's also a great factor in society, especially with the ongoing trauma of the pandemic and political upheaval. In An Island, by Karen Jennings, the protagonist goes back and forth between yearning for solitude and to belong.

Samuel has been alone on a small island for years, tending to a lighthouse that is falling apart. The only company he has are a small flock of chickens, especially an aged red hen that the other fowl pick on, and the fellows in the supply boat. Occasionally, a body washes ashore. He used to report them to the authorities as he was instructed to do, but they weren't interested and so he has been burying them within a stone fence he has been building as a sea wall.

When the body of a younger man washes ashore, he think this is going to be another one. If only he wasn't so old and hurting, it would be easier work. But then, the body shows signs of life. This victim of the sea is alive. Samuel is terrified and runs away, leaving the man on the beach overnight. He's alive the next day.

The man's appearance brings back ghosts of the past to Samuel. He recalls the 25 years he spent in prison after an unsuccessful protest against his country's dictator as one day spent over and over, like Groundhog Day. He remembers his father being crippled in fighting for independence against the government that proceded the dictator, and how his entire family turned to begging and subsistence living.

Later on, he remembers how he tried to connect with a group of protestors and how they didn't change each other's lives. He remembers refugees his father befriended, who he helped chase out of the neighborhood when the dictator began using rhetoric Trump and his ilk do.

Whatever he is doing, whatever group he is with, Samuel tries to fit in but there is little sense his heart is really in it. Only once, after years in prison and being ostracized, does he wish for friendship.

He longed to turn to his neighbor, to whisper a few words, to have someone answer him.

But when the stranger appears, Samuel veers back and forth between attempting to communicate and pushing him away. This back and forth continues to the very end, when the reader discovers the one creature for which Samuel stands up.

Samuel tries to prove the opposite of John Donne's famous line that "no man is an island" but his attempts to be cut off prove another part of Donne's Meditation XVII:

any man's death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind. 

Every death, every loss, diminishes Samuel. He is an island unto himself, but he is disintegrating as surely as the island and the lighthouse he is charged with keeping. The relentlessness of Samuel's reality is one that he faces as if it was the waves crashing onto shore all day, every day. 

It's easy to see Samuel as a failure of a human being. And to see that the deck was always stacked against him.

But it's also possible to wonder "what if?" What if any connection he made with another person turned out to not be superficial, but to be real? What would his life had been like? There is a moment in An Island when that possibility is shown. It is a moment of sorrow and forgiveness, and, even if fleeting, a moment of redemption.