This
is an extraordinary book, one of those rare stories that seem, in retrospect, inevitable,
as if it had always been part of our consciousness, only waiting for a gifted
author to do it justice. In
voice and style, Richard Raiment’s Islands is clearly inspired by the classic adventure narratives from the Age of Sail,
everything from Defoe to Stevenson. But there is much more here than a simple,
action-packed yarn of late-17th-century British mariners, tossed up together by
fate upon a remote island, struggling to survive in an alien land against the
caprice of the elements and the cruel whims of the sea, battling pirates and
slavers—as well as their own deep-seeded prejudices—in order to claim their
dignity as men. Islands is also a
touching, m/m/f polyamorous romance, a powerful
philosophical novel, as wide-ranging and wise as it is trenchant and acutely
observed; stylish, exciting, thoughtful, probing, beautiful, moving, wonderful!
Islands
is, above all, the story of an inner journey, and though introspection comes at
times with a shiny aura of anachronism—the relative ease with which the
narrator questions the
consciousness of his time, the cultural conditioning, communal beliefs, mores
and taboos of a rigidly-defined class society—his struggles are—or ought to be—timeless
and universal; the search for who we really are, deep within ourselves, as
sexual beings capable of love in whatever form that love might take, without
anyone to tell us we must be one thing or another—or enforce their sadistic,
ridiculously rigid notions of theocratic ‘natural law’ and propriety upon us.
What
makes a fictional character interesting—what makes a character great in the end—is their capacity to
grow and change within a set of limitations that place them in situations of intense
conflict. Raiment has succeeded most admirably in creating a world almost
perfectly suited for the incubation of interesting characters. Beyond the
physical setting, a small island somewhere in the tropics off the coast of Africa,
two castaways must learn to live and work together—must learn to learn from
each other—and find a way to coexist when one of the sailors, Peter, is gay (a “molly”
in the parlance of the day) while the other, Tom the narrator, is a rabidly
reflexive homophobe. Inner and outer conflict is inevitable, especially when a
young woman—an escaped slave—finds her way into their world. Ultimately the two
men—islands unto themselves—must find a way to bridge their differences, for,
as Donne so famously put it, “no man is an island”—nor can anyone pretend very
long to be so if they would be fully human. (Raiment’s title is a stroke of descriptive
genius on many levels!)
Here,
Tom reflects on what he has learned about himself and the world:
You have seen it all, I told
myself. You have seen the children begging, the babes cast dead upon the
midden, the infants sold for a pint of gin. You have the whores who lack for
nothing, pox included, from the service of ‘good gentlemen’. You have seen the
starved and hopeless driven for want of a loaf of bread, scarred by the
branding iron, deported into slavery. And this girl here, who plays you
still so gently, who restores the warm infusion of your cock? What of her? A
slave she was due to be. A Soul born in freedom, born to the sun and the jungle
or the open plain, born to a family who loved her, a source of grandparents’
pride, beloved of mother, father, aunts, uncles, siblngs, coloured by the sun
in order that she might not burn, and beautiful.
What happened to her? You know the
story. Dirty men, white or olive skinned, too often black, too, in breeches or
in Muslim robes, men who stink, unwashed, foul-breathed with pox, toothless
with scurvy, to whom she is but produce, or a beast, an infidel, a kaffir—a ‘soulless’ one, a piece of merchandise;
such men trapped her or bought her. They were armed with guns, with torches,
whips; she was armed with nothing but her wits. And they stole her.
Raiment’s
command of period idiom is without equal in modern historical fiction. His
ability to make the older forms of language work so consistently to achieve his
present literary objectives is awe-inspiring. This is an author who has clearly done
extensive research, and knows his subject matter in and out, but never bores
readers with unnecessary detail, and never wields his superior knowledge like a
bludgeon to patronize the less well-informed. There is a graciousness and a
humility that shines through every page, imbuing the storytelling with a rich
and rare humanity.
Enthusiastically
recommended!
