2014 read #112: The Island at the End of the World by Sam Taylor.

The Island at the End of the World by Sam Taylor
215 pages
Published 2009
Read from November 26 to November 27
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

I have, in many ways, conventional tastes. This came up in a spat once some years ago on a message board where I'd volunteered to judge a short story contest. One of the entrants submitted a dull, derivative would-be shocker tale of an amoral photographer sleazing around Italy, taking nude shots of teens after providing them with drugs -- basically the sort of "aren't I so transgressive" stuff that was all the rage in the 1980s. In my naiveté, I admitted I often couldn't get into stories with wholly unappealing main characters; the writer went on some sort of lit-crit rant, name-dropping niche authors and philosophers and reviving Dostoevsky vs. Tolstoy (he, modestly, cast himself as Dostoevsky), before it dawned on him, to his dismay, that I was a philistine who liked pew-pew sci-fi. He retained his sense of superiority, I gave my vote to a far more entertaining story, and that was the end of it.

It's true, though, that I really don't get into completely unappealing central characters, with few exceptions. Which makes my reaction to The Island at the End of the World kind of funny. I most enjoyed the chapters narrated by the paranoid, psychotic, abusive, religious whack-job father, while wishing I could skim past the portions narrated by his isolated, confused, lonely, aching, presumably more sympathetic son. The difference is in the narration. The father's chapters were exceptionally well-written, conveying the cadence and the impatient "Why can't you fools see this, it's all there in front of you" emphasis of paranoia so faithfully that I felt uneasy at times, recalling all too clearly my own paranoid, psychotic, abusive, religious whack-job father. Finn's chapters, however, which should have appealed to memories of growing up in total isolation under the oppressive rule of my father, struck me as wonky. The boy appears to be almost nine years old -- raised without formal schooling, it's true, but from an early age reading from a book of fairy tales and the King James Bible. I'd expect some eccentricity in his spelling, but I didn't go to school either, and by that age (one of the last years I believed my own father's delusions) I would never be spelling know as "no," I'm as "ahm," icy as "I-see," and so on. I would mix up, say, "wear" and "where"; I would have bungled out phonetic spellings of complicated words (and likely misuse some); but nothing at all like this. I have an affinity for faux-naive narration, as I mentioned in a previous review, but with Finn, it was just too much, too implausible. His voice is closer to Charlie Gordon than to grade-schooler. Taylor should have toned it down considerably -- or at least, I think so.

Finn's older sister Alice has p.o.v. chapters in the second half of the book; her voice is less original, a more typical literary prose voice, mingling hesitance and defiance as she attempts to cut loose from her father and attach herself to the stranger newly arrived to the island -- an excellent enough voice, but not as bold as the first two styles. I did, however, enjoy the consistent tics of language shared by the whole family, a clever touch given their isolation and the father's religious delusions. I could picture the children soaking up their father's speech patterns during their years on the island. That was a neat touch.

Voices and moods are the strength of this book, because the plot, such as it is, kind of fizzles toward the end, taking a weak M. Night Shyamalan twist from the rarefied airs of myth and Shakespeare to a somewhat silly and hard-to-visualize mundane explanation.