The Summer Isles – A Voyage of the Imagination review
“The boat,” wrote the philosopher Michel Foucault, “is the greatest reserve of the imagination… In civilisations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates.” The whole sweep of Western culture, from its genesis in the oral cultures of the Aegean and Near East, to its modern manifestations – including rock music – is populated by boats, both real and imaginary, and voyages.
To Odysseus’s long journeying to Ithaca, or Aeneas’s flight from Troy, or Noah’s Ark, Rimbaud’s bâteau ivre (“bathing in the poem of the sea”), or Baudelaire’s vrais voyageurs (“drunk on space, light and fiery skies”), Bob Dylan’s vision of the Titanic, with “Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot fighting in the captain’s tower”, Lou Reed’s “great big clipper ship” sailing “the darkened seas”, we must now add the Tzambika, the travel writer Philip Marsden’s real-life wooden boat: “There’s something about wooden boats,” he writes in the first chapter of The Summer Isles – A Voyage of the Imagination, “The noises they make, their smell, the subtle curve of their topsides.”
The Summer Isles are a small group of islands just off the coast of the far North-West of Scotland, to the West of Ullapool and just off the southern edge of the Assynt Peninsula. Marsden recalls summers spent long ago at his Aunt Bridget’s house, set below the famous peaks of that area – Suilven, Stac Pollaidh, Quinag and Ben More: “the oldest rocks in all Europe”. Looking out from their summits, he and Bridget became fascinated with the Summer Isles – far enough away to leave a wide expanse of sea between them and the mainland, but close enough – just a short ferry ride away: “A boat went from Ullapool, when the weather was right.”
Marsden leaves as autumn comes in and sets out for wilder places, including the Caucasus (he was working as a journalist at the time), but promises to return in the spring. “This time, we might make it out to the Summer Isles,” Bridget tells him over the phone. The next day, Bridget goes out walking, this time to Ben More. She never returned, and was found at the bottom of a gully a few days later. “She’d fallen. That was all,” writes Marsden.
Some years later, Marsden decides to take his little wooden boat, Tsambika, on a voyage up the west coast of Ireland and Scotland, his ultimate destination the Summer Isles. It is here that his account begins.
Hopping between islands, he explores their local histories and ponders the status of “the West” in Britain’s mythical imagination, and in tracing the stories of the islands and sailing between them, Marsden leaves us with a thrilling picture of our enduring fascination with the “places of the sunset”: the Celtic “Otherworld”, where islands disappear and re-appear as if by magic and which mariners imagined to be places of absolute bliss, fertility and magical happenings; the modern romance of the West Coast as a place of retreat for the painters and poets of the 20th century (like Sylvia Plath, who spent some of her last months on Inishbofin and recalled “inhaling the sea air ecstatically”); and the stories of the selkies in Scotland, seals which could take on the form of women, and which existed on the same plane as “fairies and angels”.
I must admit, too, that the Summer Isles have always exerted a powerful pull on my own imagination. I saw them from far off as a boy, and I have never really forgotten the sight. Then, a couple of years ago, I was standing on a beach to the south called Mellon Udrigle. It’s a ring of white sand on the north side of a spit of land that arches out into the Atlantic. It was a day typical of the West – a sharp wind, dark cloud, giving way to flashes of bright sunlight, the great brown mountains shrouded, then lit up as if grazed with gold. I saw a seal (or was it a selkie?) pop its head above the water – it remained there for a while, and then swam away. Now I think about it, it had turned towards the Summer Isles.