Customer Reviews

Sea Room: An Island Life in the Hebrides

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

"She wanted to leave. She was unable to see the point in being out on a shelterless rock in a meaningless sea, under a muffled grey sky, where there are no loos and no baths, where there is not even a little copse or spinney in which one can sit down and read, where the house itself is little better than a shed, where the wind blows and blows and where your husband is for some reason obsessed with every fact and detail of this godforsaken nowhere."

Such is the enthusiasm for the Shiant Isles exhibited by the wife of Adam Nicolson, author of SEA ROOM. Adam is owner of these roughly six hundred acres distributed over three wave and wind ravaged islands in the Minch, that stretch of ocean lying between the Scottish island of Skye and the Outer Hebrides. Adam had inherited them from his father, who purchased them in 1937.

The author does indeed examine every fact and detail that can be known or surmised about this edge on civilization's margin: the art of getting there by small boat, the migratory bird life, its human history as revealed by archeology and public records, its geology, its successive native industries over the centuries (farming, fishing, kelping, sheepherding), and its weather. Occasionally, there's unintended humor, as when he describes the labors involved in transferring some cattle off the island by coastal steamer:

"The men waited below (the steamer) in the dinghy as the poor beast was lifted by its horns high into the air, bellowing at the indignity and with fear. Just as the animal was high above the gunwale, the men in the dinghy guiding it in by the tail, the bullock emptied the entire contents of its four stomachs over the men below. That was the last time any cattle were seen on the Shiants." Or, when he describes the equally valiant efforts of the rams (tups) sent to the islands to impregnate the resident ewes:

"The tups are put on in November, about eight or nine of them for the three hundred-odd ewes, and are taken off in February, knackered (exhausted)." Yes, well, that's the plight of us males everywhere regardless of species. It's a tough and thankless but necessary job.

Most of SEA ROOM is a sober narrative about ordinary life on, and the ecosystem of, the Shiants - ordinary with a capital "O". After all, through the centuries no more than perhaps thirty people have called the islands home at any one time. It was never the site of a great city, or the center of an empire, or the scene of heroic accomplishment beyond just making a life in a remote and inhospitable place. Indeed, the Shiants have lacked permanent human residents for the past hundred years. Thus, while Nicolson's magnificent prose makes the story reasonably interesting, it wasn't enough to earn more than four stars in my opinion ... that is, until the concluding chapter. It's because of these last pages, a heartfelt and poignant manifesto of the author's great and consuming love for this far-flung spot, a legacy for his son Tom, that I finally awarded five stars for the whole.

"I was left alone in the silence, with the pale sun on my face, and, as the dogs nosed for nothing in the grasses, I started to fall asleep there to the long, asthmatic rhythm of the surf. The islands embraced and enveloped me. Twenty yards to my left the Viking was asleep in his grave ..."

This is kind of a scattershot book, but interesting and fun to read for all that. Mr. Nicolson is the aristocrat-author owner of the Shiant (pronounced 'shant') Islands in the inner part of the Outer Hebrides, and he wrote the book as a 'love letter' to them. In it he takes up geology, archaeology, history, genealogy, biology, ecology and ornithology, and also considers boat building, shepherding, fishing, folklore and the tragedy of the commons, all in an effort to explain and share his love for the islands; which task, in the end, he manages pretty well.

The book is roughly structured around a year in the life of the Shiants, but Nicolson doesn't let this stop him from ranging wherever his desire leads; which means that while it isn't exactly a page-turner when looked at as a whole, each section is entirely coherent and quite compelling, and the overall structure means they flow into one another reasonably enough. The biggest portion of the book is given over to archaeology, shading into speculative (in the good sense, as practiced by Farley Mowat) history. Nicolson a exhibits strong desire to recreate for his readers the lives of his islands' earlier inhabitants, which also leads him to examine more recent history. Here and there he leans towards overly romanticizing the lives of the islanders, but on the whole he does a wonderful job of conveying the realities of their existence: most strikingly in his account of Campbell family, who lived on the Shiants in the mid-19th century. He also throws in a fair amount of what might be called tangential information--his description of shepherding on the islands and his scale of the edibility of birds eggs were particularly good--which together combines to create a fair picture of the islands; or, at least, the islands as he sees them.

Obviously, the islands themselves are the common theme holding the book together. But also present throughout the whole account, from a derogative cartoon about him that Nicolson includes in the first chapter to his closing ruminations about passing the islands on to his son, is the question of what it means to own the islands, and indeed to own land in general. Nicolson approaches the question on two levels: on the first, he quotes a drunken pub patron who once told him that his shepherd tenants are the Shiants' real owners, and on the second he includes a letter from Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, which tried to obtain the islands as a public trust in the '70s. The last chapter of the book includes Nicolson's account of an ongoing discussion about what right he has to the islands and whether they ought to be public property. Nicolson is far from a stereotypical grasping absentee landlord, and in fact he rather agrees with his drunken accuser. He's not convinced, though, that public ownership would be any better for the islands: he feels that 'protecting' them would actually end up attracting more visitors, while at the same time tying management of the islands with layers of needless complication.

And to his credit, Nicolson ends the book with an actual invitation to visit the islands: if you email him, he writes, he'll give you the keys to the cottage. What public trust could provide that? How the scheme will work under his son, who gets the islands in 2005, and under any potential increased pressure from visitors, is open to question; but Nicolson does a good job explaining his position, and the question of ownership provides a tension and center to the book that would otherwise be lacking.<P...

I feared that I would never manage my dream of living in a remote part of the Outer Hebrides, and then there was "Sea Room." With warmth and tremendous art, Adam Nicolson conveys every sight, every sound, every feeling, and provides facts and insights into every conceivable aspect of this estimable ancient place. His exceptional sensiblilties and his evident passion for full knowledge have led him to tell us not only about the Shiants, but also about ship building (past and present), sailing and seafaring, Gaelic as well as Norse languages, with plenty of legends, folk lore, music and poetry, geology, ornithology - he never stops, never holds back. And the best part is, it feels like reading a long, delightful letter from you dearest friend.

There are many people in the world who daydream about islands, who read about them, who travel to them, for whom islands possess a powerful, magnetic pull---Adam Nicolson, whose father gifted him with the Shiant Islands on his 21st birthday, has written a book for all of us who have wished time and again for our own special island...but before we all break into a chorus of "Bali H'ai," let me warn you that Mr. Nicolson's islands, the Shiants, just off the coast of the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, are anything but tropical, and far from daydream or fiction. Sea Room, while written without any overt romantic sensibility, nevertheless tugs at the heart-strings in a profound way which I'm having trouble describing to people... It's deeply-grounded in the gritty details of life in the Isles: poverty, isolation, the harsh climate, the difficulty in trade, transportation, and health care, the underlying controversies over the very idea of ownership of land and wilderness. It's just as strong in describing the strengths of family and interconnected community ties, the deep roots of regional history and archaeology, the spine-shiver of local legends, the sense of "otherness" which in Celtic lands is as close as the other side of your shadow...

Perhaps the true beauty of this book lies in this paradox: in focusing so tightly on so small a subject, a place about which he cares so passionately, Nicolson touches something universal, creating something accessible (and engaging) to the wide, wide world. The language is lovely; the Islands are lovelier. And Nicolson's eldest son, who will be gifted with the Shiants in a year or two, is one lucky man.

Adam Nicolson has invited us to his little islands of the Hebrides, the Shiants, in a fine book, _Sea Room: An Island Life in the Hebrides_ (North Point Press). He writes: "I love the Shiants for all their ragged, harsh and delicate glory and this book is a love letter to them." It is one of the most persuasive love letters ever written. He knows the islands better than anyone ever has, and has conveyed what he knows in one fascinating chapter after another. There is plenty of intense pleasure he conveys about living on the islands themselves, but his love is not blind; within the pages about his season here are also large quantities of battering waves, rain, cold, inconvenience, and the droppings of rats and sheep. It is all described with a passionate attention to detail. He writes lovingly of other people, like the boatwright who builds him a Viking-inspired sailboat in which he can commute the 16 miles to his island, or the friends he visits on the mainland who insist on cleaning his clothes and his person when he visits, or even the local press that caricatures him as a bowler-wearing aristocrat supremely out of place.

For further details on his islands, he has enlisted the help of various experts. For instance, from Czechoslovakia comes a team of archeologists to study one of the ruined houses on the islands. When they find a carve stone, he trucks it all over the British Isles, so that we get to learn the geology of the stone, the philosophy of hermits a millennium ago, and how such a stone might do for either a grave marker or a pillow. Within the excavation is also a binding strip, probably from a Bible, but Nicolson shows that "the replacement with a printed Gaelic Bible of a nurtured ancient stone was a symptom not of godliness but of empire, imposition, control and a sort of shrinking of life." People farmed on the islands for two millennia with a relatively good living. Nicolson's meticulous gathering of as much as can be known about the islands' history, however, shows that the insularity which was no obstacle for Vikings and hermits became a liability in the modern world where the Shiants had no closeness to markets and no access to the materials of modern civilization. Self-sufficiency was enough before 1600, but after 1800 there was no permanent inhabitation.

Nicolson writes with humility about his ownership, which he realizes is due to chance. His father bought the islands, and gave them to him on his twenty-first birthday, and he will in turn give them to his son on his twenty-first. He displays the contingencies of theft, war, and murder by which we claim a parcel of earth as our own. He knows that in a larger sense the shepherds are closer to possessing the islands by gaining a living from them than he is having a simple deed of ownership. But he makes the case that his islands can do very well in an enlightened private ownership which recognizes that they are the possessions of the area and of the world. I wrote that he invited us to the islands, and this is a literal invitation. Read through this book and you will find his e-address (and for use after 5 March 2005, the e-address of his son) by which you can ask him for the key of the primitive little house he uses when he himself goes there. After reading this winning report on the islands that possess him, I bet he gets plenty of takers.

Ah, what a fine book this is. Reading it is like spending time with a new friend. Nicholson has a sharp and curious mind and a generous spirit. You may not think you can be much interested in a group of three little islands in the Outer Hebrides - the Shiants - their climate, wildlife, prehistory, geology, archeology, socio-economics, agriculture, shepherding, folk literature, the sea currents around them, and the host of other topics covered in this book, but Nicholson draws you in. Soon you are immersed in whatever there is to be known about what amounts to less than a square mile of rock, cliffs, beach, and meadow.

The book is organized around the turn of the year, beginning with Nicholson's first journey to the islands in his own boat in the spring, and ending with the first gusty wet weather of autumn, as he sits at the window in a two-room cottage writing. Into this annual cycle he interweaves story upon story, often speculative, of how the islands came to be, how they came to be what they are, and the people over thousands of years who have lived here.

As the year passes, Nicholson sketches in the broad sweep of recorded history from St. Columba to the present, noting the several hands through which the islands have passed, including his father's and his own. A team of archeologists identifies the remains of Iron and Bronze Age settlements and spends a summer uncovering a long abandoned farmstead. The discovery of a buried cobblestone with an ancient inscription sends him on one of many attempts to unravel mysteries that he uncovers.

The book is based on considerable research, and Nicholson pieces together a previously unwritten history of the islands with references drawn from many old documents and interviews with historians and other experts. He helpfully illustrates his text with many photographs, drawings, and maps.

This book is for anyone who feels the magical pull of islands. You will not regard them quite the same way again.

Superb! As someone of Scottish ancestry who went to graduate school there back in the 1970s, I was naturally drawn to this book. Taken at face value, writing a book on three tiny, uninhabited islands is quite challenging, given the nearly four hundred pages this book encompasses. Mr. Nicolson writes stirring prose as he disects every aspect of the Shiants--history, geology, plant life, animal life, etc. From this, the reader can acquire knowledge on a wide variety of subjects that extend well-beyond these little isles--for example, I learned that the abundant defecation of geese is brought about their need to constantly reduce body weight or else lose the ability to fly, as these are indeed heavy birds.

As one interested in the history of the Western Isles, what these islands experienced has application for this entire area, in that many of the smaller isles have experienced the same trend towards depopulation that have beset the Shiants, with the last permanent residents leaving the Shiants in the early 1900s. The author contends that all of this a byproduct of modern, urbanized society which results in individuals in remote places feeling isolated, a psychology that didn't exist 500 years ago when what one could find on one island or the nearby mainland didn't differ substantially from the small islands you inhabited.

Humor abounds, especially funny to read about his father's experinces in the 1930s, the story of him walking around in the nude as he was the only one there, only to be surprised by unknown visitors having a pic nic. Also in the 1930s, his father invited two beautiful young ladies who were to serve as bridesmaids for the future Queen Elizabeth II for a visit. The author muses on why Dad ever invited them as the rat-infested house had no electricity and conditions were very primitive. The trip ends horribly for the young women, with a rat disrupting their sleep and their having to leave the isle the next day by wading out to the boat taking them back to the mainland. Conditions today are still just as primitive-no electricity, running water, etc.

Best part--the end--beautiful description of sitting on a high hill--with the Isle of Skye to the east, the Outer Hebrides to the west. What a place! What a book!

This book is, as one reviewer accurately puts it, a "scattershot" account of one man and his deep, abiding love for the Shiants (pronounced "Shants"), the three barren islands he has inherited in the Outer Hebrides. The man is Adam Nicolson (Baron Adam Nicolson, mind you, though he never mentions the title here, in keeping with his ambivalence toward "ownership" of them, described quite thoroughly herein). This love and attachment to place and his experiences - sometimes quite harrowing - constitute the theme of the book in the first several chapters and the last.

N.B. - The web page here, for some reason, puts the book's length erroneously at 256 pages. My copy and those of other reviewers with different editions who mention the length all seem to have the correct page number: 391.

The middle of the book - especially compared with the poetic prose of the first chapters - is a bit weighted down for my tastes with geological, socio-economic and historical minutiae about these islands. It's all quite interesting at first. But, caveat lector, Nicholson does go on a bit. In fact, the middle of the book would serve quite well, I think, as the foundation for a doctoral dissertation.

But let me get on with what I loved about the book. Nicolson is a highly reflective, poetic and yet dogged writer who writes with a lovely relish about the desolate, frequently perilous beauty of these islands. He describes - better than I can - his instincts in life and writing beautifully:

"One of the reasons I loved the Shiants was that they were away from the world of definition.....I never think things through. I never have. I never envisage the end before I plunge into the beginning. I never clarify the whole. I bank on instinct, allowing my nose to sniff its way into the vacuum, trusting that somewhere or other, soon enough, out of the murk, something is bound to turn up."

He goes on to quote some lines from poet Denise Levertov:

"There's nothing
The dog disdains on his way,
Nevertheless he
Keeps moving, changing
Pace and approach but
Not direction - every step an arrival."

He also mentions Emily Dickinson and quotes Yeats and Shelley. These are the sections I truly loved. Other reviewers have tended to dwell on the last chapter and the question of whether Nicolson should "own" the islands. The question is very much a non-starter for me. He should.

In his passage describing medieval solitaries, Nicolson writes:

"All the solitaries of the past have lived with that intense inner sociability. Their minds are peopled with taunters, seducers, advisors, supervisors, friends and companions. It is one of the tests of being alone: a crowd from whom there is no hiding."

It is the great wonder of the best parts of the book that the reflective Nicolson describes his own inner personae, but that also the reader meets actual people - fulfilling these same roles - whom Nicolson has encountered during his long enchantment with the Shiants.

Reminiscent of Heat-Moon's PrairyErth: A Deep Map Nicolson's work is also a map in depth of the Shiants; tiny islands off the coast of Skye, in the Hebrides that his father gave him. Nicolson, born in 1957, lives with his family in Sissinghurst Castle, and is the 5th Baron Carnock, although we are told he never uses the title. (Can I borrow it then please Adam?) His father author Nigel Nicolson who gave the islands to Adam, bought the islands when his mother, authoress, Vita Sackville-West found them listed for sale by author Comptom McKenzie!

All this talent, Nicolson claims, descended from an early branch of marauding Hebridean pirates and shepherds. Indeed, the Shiants were actually owned by the Nicolson clan centuries before his father's gift but were lost to one of those perpetual clan wars and raids the featured in this glorious region's long history. Adam decide on conservation and archeology, not profit, eventually opening up the isles to scholarly research international archeology teams and camping Boy Scouts. He has the honour of preserving these wonderful, floating, tiny bits of man's history but later argues against his own `ownership' in context and principle.

Early in his ownership, whilst visiting his mentor and tenant he meets a typical "Jock of the North', looming over the author he challenges;
"Ar yew the man who says he owns the Shiants?'
"Yes," I said, smiling charm, the English defence, "I am actually".
"Will, yer a sackful o' shite".

Adam commissions an appropriate boat, a sixteen-foot, clinker built replica of the ancient boats with a Viking heritage. Declaring her a beauty he hesitating asks the dour, neat Hebridean builder if he will be able to become a proper sailor of her.
"Aye, if you had another life" is his reply.

But, in fact, he is a quick learner and studies his craft as closely as his windswept and near-barren islands, uses his `little ship' well, joins the shepherd's in their annual roundup and gets the local accolade of knowing "every inch, rock and pebble' of his glorious heritage.

He notes that ladies never find the `house island' (Eilean an Tighe) a welcoming environment and later archeology reveals a valid reason for such feminine detection of vibes - a limpet pile in the byre that shows the famine years, even decades, of starvation and hardship when the residents were reduced to eating this, the island's most repellent resource.

Adam has deeded his islands to his son in turn and they remain a glorious resource in trust for us all (...).

Not the other way around. This was the greatest theme I took away from Adam Nicolson's "Sea Room," the story of the three tiny, uninhabited Shiant (say "Shant") Islands in the Hebrides of Scotland, which Nicholson inherited from his father (the famed author Nigel Nicolson, the son of Vita Sackville-West).

Nicolson's approach to describing the islands for his readers resembles John McPhee's: it's an engaging blend of natural history (how were the islands formed?), human history (who lived here and why?), archaeology, and ecology (how do the animals and plants of the Shiants form a whole world?). The difference is that Nicolson's passion for place is quite specific: he loves the Shiants like one loves one's parents, infinitely and irreplaceably. You can't imagine him running off and writing a second book about another place.

Nicolson's prose is lyric and detailed at the same time; despite the length (350 pages and more), the story never flags. At the end of the book, Nicholson defends his continued private ownership of the islands (many feel they should be a public trust); I wasn't convinced, but I respected his strong urge to transmit his love of the place to his son and future generations of his family.

By the way, Nicholson publicly offers the keys to his cottage to anyone desiring to stay there (his e-mail address is in the book); but consider first that rats seem now to be part of the natural ecology of the place. But perhaps that won't phase you (it doesn't phase Nicholson a bit!).