Customer Reviews

Island Magic

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Island Magic charmed me to my toes. This book is truly magical as Mrs. Goudge captures her readers and transports them to another time and place. Her writing style, characterization, and plot are all top notch - full of a grace, style, and emotion rarely found in any genre today. I read a library copy about 10 years ago and truly wish it was one of those books I did not return. It would've been worth almost any amount of library fines. Anyway, it's on my Top 10 list along with I Captured the Castle; The Hobbit; and The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe.

As the first reviewer implied, the images from this book stay with you the rest of your life. You become one of the du Frocq family children and more your own self as a child. This would be in my list of books considered for my top spot; I've had it searched for by used book stores in the past and paid $35-$40 for it.

If you do to, you will love this. The vision of this island, its flowers, cottages, and town, is clear in my memory though it has been years since I read it. The presence of the sea surrounding everything is powerful. Unlike Linnets and Valerians, this did not scare me as a youngster, when I read it.

What a wonderful book! The characters are so fun an charming and still real. I love Elizabeth Goudge as a child and read this one as an adult. Loved it!

Elizabeth Goudge's first novel -- a masterpiece
On one side of her family, Elizabeth Goudge had ancestors from the Channel Islands.
Several of her books deal either with stories of the Islands, or events and characters among her ancestors.
This is Goudge's FIRST novel.
"Island Magic" is a splendid book.

The central narrative is about a young man, married, struggling as a farmer, who actually wants to be a writer.
His wife helps him, emotionally and in other ways, as much as she can.
She has great sensitivity, and an inherited second sense that verges on telepathy.
Their young children have adventures and imaginary games around the island townships, and landscapes, often haunted by a sense of fairyland traditions that are alive on the island. (Think of the Irish tradition of leprachauns, for example.) (There is a sequel of linked short stories about these children, "Make-Believe": a book for children, and not a serious addition to, or sequel for the events of "Island Magic". But most of the stories are true, as told to Goudge by elderly relatives from the island.)

During a terrible storm a ship sinks, but a strange, powerful, and dangerous man is rescued.
He becomes a third adult in the family: a Heathcliff-like charismatic rogue: a temptation to the young wife.
I will leave any interested reader to explore the riches of this book.
There is a happy ending. But there are terrible prices to be paid!
Very highly recommended.

Let me add the following detail, in case any of it helps.

Her first published novel, Island Magic, (published when she was 34) is based loosely on her maternal grandparents and her mother as a child and their life on Guernsey in the English Channel. All the elements that are typical of Goudge's writing can be seen in this first story. Intense observation of landscape, emotions that soar and plunge, references to earlier writers, such as Shakespeare, Keats, Browning and Hopkins, a narrative full of characters from a richly varied community, from domineering upper class society, down to the bitterly exploited working class.

At the heart of Island Magic are the du Frocqs, a tempestuous, loving family, celebrating seasons and festivals with riotous, joyful energy. Andre du Frocq is no farmer. Yet rather than give in to his domineering father, the self-opinionated island doctor, and become a doctor too, something his long-lost runaway older brother also refused to do, he struggles to run the farm, slowly exhausting his wife's dowry. After sixteen years of marriage, and farming, both against his father's wishes, Andre expects disaster for himself, Rachell, and their five surviving children. Gifted with "second sight" (an example of Goudge's sparing use of the supernatural), Rachell foresees salvation in the form of a shipwrecked, scar-faced man. Shortly after this a ship is wrecked on nearby jagged rocks, and a survivor brought ashore. Rachel recognises him from her vision. Yet who is he? What is his bond with the island? Can her marriage survive the love that flares between Rachell and this embittered stranger? What has Andre spent his time on secretly, distracted from his farmers chores? How can the farm be saved?

Stated this way, such narrative questions smack of crude "romance". But Island Magic is no mere cliched romance novel. Typically for Goudge, the du Frocq children play a significant part in the larger concerns of the adults. For Goudge, adults and children alike share the same driving hungers, and are equally close to the book's central moral issues such as the paradox of freedom and obedience (that we are most truly free when we accept or choose constraints tantamount to imprisonment), or the paradox of good and evil (that a wicked creature may be able to discern the paths through heaven that are hidden from the good people inside), or the paradox of Christian faith sitting comfortably beside ancient pagan belief (as does the church-going Islander's belief in the water fairies of their Island and their legend of their own fairy ancestors). Colin will be a sailor, with the freedom of the seas and the imprisonment of a ship's cabin. Jacqueline will find her independent self in the submission to holy orders as a nun. Michelle will be a great teacher, whose deep commitment to this world is shot through with Keat's mystical vision of another world. Yet through the book they squabble and lie and behave like typically boisterous annoying lovable children, in much the same way the adults squabble, lie and boister.

It is also typical of Goudge's writing that key events in the narrative are anticipated or easily predicted by the reader. Like Greek tragedies, whose plots are well-known to the audience, Goudge's novels do not hesitate to reveal what will happen. She does not write narrative thrillers, with unpredictable, twisting plots, although expected events often arrive in very surprising ways, or hinge on natural circumstance. What keeps us reading is Goudge's exploration of character, waiting to see how she will achieve the things we expect, gripped by the arguments and ideas that teem in the characters' minds, charmed by the passion with which the story unfolds to its hard-won satisfactory endings. Equally, she openly declares what her characters are thinking, and why they think this. The depth of her characters does not come from ambiguity, uncertainty or mystery, but from the clashing contradictions that contend within each individual, held in precarious balance, or unbalanced! Indeed, with a rich, leisurely direct presentation of character and action (not many actions, much detailed observation) her novels have the pastoral quality of the neglected novel Amaryllis at the Fair (1887) by Richard Jefferies, better known for his children's novel Bevis (1882).

Equally typical of Goudge, her characters in Island Magic are tormented by religious scruple or religious doubt, seeking forgiveness for guilt, or hoping for assurance and certainty, or resolving to accept faith despite terrifying doubts and suffering. Yet Goudge never preaches. These matters of religion arise from the characters and their setting, in the same way that Catholicism and love is a continual thread, sometimes an overt issue, in the novels of Graham Greene, or wickedness, suffering and atonement is the moral heart of Dostoevsky's work, or vast cosmic theologies underlie the novels for children and adults of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.

Within two hundred and fifty pages, many years, from past and future, are brought into the sharp focus of a year of present narrative time. Island Magic reaches back to the legendary fairy-tale past of the Island, and earlier to the first Christmas manger, touches on Andre's and his brother's childhood, and anticipates the adulthood of the du Frocq children. In other books, such as the "Torminster trilogy", whose central character is Henrietta, which comprises A City of Bells, Sister of the Angels, and Henrietta's House, and the "Damerosehay trilogy" comprising The Bird in the Tree, The Herb of Grace, and The Heart of the Family about the Eliot family, narratives and character unfold at greater leisure. In the length of book and concentration on the life and times of one character, Goudge's historical novels, especially The White Witch and The Child From the Sea rival those of Victor Hugo.

John Gough -- Deakin University -- JAGough49@gmail.com

The story is wonderful,with Goudge's usual exquisite and beautifully descriptive writing. I highly recommend it. My problem was with the poor quality of editing in the copy I received from Amazon. I have NEVER purchased a book with so many glaring errors in editing. I don't know what happened to the proof-reader, if there was one. About 1/3 of the way through, I finally began to jot down the pages with glaring typos....I counted 48 from page 100 forward. This is inexcusable in a new book which I paid full price for. From what I can deduce, these books are printed in some connection with Amazon...they need to get new proof-readers. Sometimes the intended meaning of the word was difficult to determine. Once, there was a word somehow printed in German, that I happened to be able to translate. What gives?? That said, the novel remains one of my favorites. I just wish editions from a more consistently reliable publisher were available.