Customer Reviews

Hy Brasil

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The discovery and charting of the New World during the late 15th and early 16th centuries, reasonably, should have outdated whimsical medieval maritime maps and eyewitness reports of bizarre encounters whilst embarked upon astounding sea voyages. These credulous documents imparted vistas of magical, mythical neverlands abounding with improbable creatures, similarly to the space travel yarns of a later epoch. Rather than abolish the earlier phantasmagoric sagas, the creation of maps and globes plotting this terra nova and placing the old world in a fresh context merely relocated and enshrined storybook isles upon the retreating formless fringes of the unknown world.

The tenacity of fantasy fascinates me. In fact, I think that the persistence of imaginary places was a "good thing". I regret the virtual disappearance of chimerical islands from our work-a-day sea charts. I've irrationally wished that these places really did exist and somehow would be re-discovered. So I welcome Margaret Elphinstone's novel Hy Brasil as a spirited, credible depiction of an alternate universe in which one of these enchanted eccentric archipelagoes resides. The legendary isle of Hy Brasil subsists thanks to her descriptive exactitude and deft verbal navigation.

For the past two millennia islands - both real and imaginary - have beckoned the fireside dreamer, an alluring vision of desire and pleasure on the hazy horizon of Western awareness. Perhaps this phenomenon can be traced to Homer, Plato's Atlantean allegory, Aenias or the ancient tale of Jason and the Argonauts. It thrived through the fabled explorations of that self-proclaimed pragmatist Herodotus, the uncertain arctic expedition of Pytheas in Alexander's time, and the Dark Age adventures of half-mythical seafaring Celtic monks and the seven refugee Portuguese bishops fleeing Moslem cruelty.

I lived on an Atlantic coast for most of my youth when I explored with a small duck punt among desolate inlets, bays and once (thanks to youthful recklessness, tidal malevolence and unseasonable storm) upon the great ocean itself. I secretly longed to lock on to the apparition of some remote mist-shrouded lighthouse, stow my oars, ride the surf and beach my tiny craft upon such a fairy-tale shoreline.

My attention was long drawn to a cluster of islands that, up until the mid 19th century, adorned authoritative atlases of the Atlantic Ocean. They vary in their placement by several hundred miles, but invariably they are lodged somewhere in the watery void between the temperate Azores and frigid Newfoundland. Their names evoke Gulliver's Travels, Treasure Island, and Tolkien's Middle Earth: Frisland, Estotiland, Drogeo, Icaria, Buss, Isle of Demons, Antillia, and Hy Brasil. These places are enshrined in such literary hoaxes as the 16th century travelogue of the Zeno brothers and three spurious expeditions that cluttered and confused the knowledge of the elusive Northwest Passage, namely the "Voyages of Imagination" (perhaps better called "Imaginary Voyages") of Juan de Fuca, Bartholomew de Fonte and Lorenzo Ferrer Maldonado. They reside alike in sober ships' logs and literary fabrications. Yet they persisted on authoritative sea charts until the mid-19th century. They baffled and frustrated, were found then lost again in the fog of half-remembered geographic illusion. Some poet-scholars, like the insightful Ms. Elphinstone, seek them still, somewhere between pure invention and wondrous possibility.

Hy Brasil , the novel, is what used to be called a "literary conceit": a sort of reverie with realist pretensions worked out in a believable world of make-believe. It is not, as some might suppose, a utopia or even its opposite a dystopia. Those genres embrace the dramatic presentation of some political or philosophical theory of what ought or ought not to be.

Elphinstone, thankfully, does not theorize or preach, but merely supposes. She asks the question: "what if one of the lost islands of lore and legend were to manage to survive into our own time-frame.?" But her answer does not conceive some elusive Brigadoon, a magical kingdom that periodically disappears then reappears (Hy-Brasil itself, according to one legend is perpetually shrouded in fog, appearing out from the mist only once in every seven years, but can never be reached). Her Hy Brasil has been a fixture of the mid-Atlantic since some adventurous Irish holy men allegedly landed there in the time of the equally legendary King Arthur. Yet sailors and cartographers speculated on its location and very existence up until the late Victorian epoch. It wasn't a pure figment of imagination although it continues to be cloaked in mystery.

Rather than couch the hypothesis in terms of the fantastic, the author, who has embraced Atlantic journeys and islands as her special literary niche, grounds the legendary island group firmly in our universe. So we have no faeries, goblins, sprites, dragons and trolls come a-calling. There's no Gawain, Lochinvar Frodo, Gandalf or Narnia to beguile us, or lost civilizations found -- only menacing drug-smugglers, radical politicos, pub-crawling charlatans, modern-day pirates and simmering volcanoes. These mundane forces play out in the post Cold War world, where a once thriving fishing industry has waned, and NATO has largely abandoned it's mid-Atlantic outpost, leaving the archipelago bereft of resources albeit unaccountably flush. Nonetheless the reader senses that magic and myth lurks in Elphinstone's captivating true-life Hy Brasil. There is something delightfully ethereal about this island nation.

I was attracted to Ms. Elphinstone's sparkling apparition not only on account of the intriguing subject matter but because the book displays a detailed map just after the title page. Maps are phenomenal tools for the novelist who wants to infuse a fantasy world with skin and bones. Much like the counterfeit map of Nicolo Zeno decorating his clever 16th century tale of American discovery in 1400, a detailed map imparts sober credibility to a fanciful romance. The "Zeno Conspiracy" was enshrined in the respected, though speculative, globes and world maps of Mercator, Waldseemuller, and Ortelius in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Elphinstone demonstrates that she has read the various studies and travelers' tales regarding these shifting phantom islands and has grasped the possibilities inherent in their authentication by navigational handbooks. Her map is precise and detailed; although I wish that its image wasn't so blurry (at least on my copy of the paper cover edition).

At the very outset, the reader is warned to expect some deception. The protagonist, Sidony Redruth, has deceitfully won an essay competition to write a travel guide-book by pretending she has visited out-of-the-way islands, whereas she has in fact remained firmly ensconced in the UK, diligently utilizing inter-library loan to underpin her ersatz travelogue. She spends her ill-gotten prize money on a trip to Venice, her first actual venture away from home, and is further "rewarded" by a commission to write the first visitors' guide to the archipelago of Hy Brasil, apparently situated somewhere southwest of Iceland, roughly halfway between Galway, Ireland and Newfoundland. It's poetic justice of sorts that a deceiver would be sent to document an ostensibly mythical land.

Place and personal names on Hy Brasil are borrowed amply and splendidly from the lore and literature of islands and epic Atlantic voyaging, from the monastic mission of St. Brendan in the 6th century ( here presumed to be fact-based) , through the Icelandic Sagas, Beowulf, Shakespeare's The Tempest, the Portuguese and Spanish discoverers' logs, Hakluyt's Voyages, the accounts of the expeditions of Francis Drake, Cabot, Vespucci, and Frobisher, to Stevenson's seafaring tales, Cook's journals and Melville's Moby Dick, to name but a few.

As she proceeds to compile her "notes" for her Hy Brasil Baedeker, provisionally, and meaningfully, titled "Undiscovered Islands", Sidony makes a grand tour of the island territory and unravels dark family secrets, some going back to the medieval period of the realm's history, as well as compiling details of the island's rich, multi-cultural past ( incorporating Irish, Norse, Portuguese/Spanish and African elements), it's fascinating ancient forts and dwellings, the varied and exotic geological foundations, including volatile and seemingly threatening tectonic/volcanic instability and the sub-plot embracing the whole - the ongoing salvage work done on a Spanish treasure galleon in territorial waters. The boiling volcano itself seems to personify one of the sinister forces that torment the denizens of Shakespeare's bleak island in the Tempest, or the anthropomorphic islands of Sindbad's romance and Dark Age Gallic legend.

The voice of the story alternates between the first person travel notes for the protagonist's guide book and various characters' perspectives on the several sub-plots. The transitions between these different points of view are not always smooth (a minor quibble), but one eventually gets the sense of why a particular vantage is chosen. Sidony's rationale for having her notes incorporate private and personal confessions is her informed judgment that the best of travel writing combines objective data with idiosyncratic impressions. Her inclusion of some rather delicate revelations about her romantic relationship with the enigmatic Jared Honeyman, and her candid impressions of some of the island's leading citizens are justified as simply comprising raw diary entries that will likely have to be pruned from the final product.

The tapestry of ethnic and historical background is especially fascinating to me. The castle of Ravenscar, dating from around the 14th century, is undergirt with cellars and caves, some of which go back to the sojourn of the Irish monks. There is a wealth of architecture and artifact from the several cultural strands - Portuguese, Viking, Gaelic, English, Arab, African, etc. Each character, the indispensable journalist, the museum curator/librarian, the aristocratic and tragic heiress of the castle, the photographer artiste, the turbulent president, and the African-descended realist Ishmael, among several others, has a key role to play in illuminating Hy Brasil's evolution from medieval origins through the pangs of modern anti-colonialist policy. One legacy, that of the reign of the Pirate Kings of the 17th century, endures in a secret brotherhood that perpetuates the buccaneer mystique as it conceals a more sinister contemporary brand of piracy. The specter of Henry Morgan haunts these arcane proceedings.

This scintillating journey into the shadow realm straddling the ancient fascination with mythical distant islands and the modern desire to escape to an insular vacation paradise embraces the best of historical fiction writing: it informs while it entertains.