There is pain in life that starts so early, cuts so deep, and leaves such a long-lasting, festering wound that we wonder if we will truly ever get over it.
Our responses to such pervasively terrible wounding vary but the truth of the matter is, facing up to the pain itself and what caused it is often beyond the ability of many of us to truly process and so, we limp along, hiding away from it, knowing that we are still metaphorically bleeding from multiple injury points but unable to do what to do but to remove ourselves from the point of origin.
This is what Lorna, protagonist of Libby Page’s delightfully substantial novel, The Island Home, has done; fleeing a monumentally scarring childhood on the small island of Kip up in the Scottish Hebrides, she fled to London 22 years earlier, crafting a small but safe world comprised of her, her sparklingly intelligent daughter Ella – with whom she enjoys a Gilmore Girls-ish vibe – and her job as the deputy head teacher at the Isle of Dogs where she also lives.
Her world is circumscribed and insular, a place where no one can really hurt her because no one, bar her best friend Cheryl who is there on a close but still limited basis, can enter, rendering her secure but alone, alive but not thriving.
Still, it’s better than the life she left behind, one in which she endured torment and cruelty on an island that to many other people is the very definition of a bucolic idyll.
“And then the line went dead. I never heard from her again. After that call I shuffled close to Ella, reaching my face down so I could feel the soft warmth of her breath.
‘I promise to keep you safe,’ I told her that day. It’s a promise I’ve spent her whole life trying to keep.” (P. 145)
One of those people is Alice, who arrived many years before before one brief summer interning on a project until she fell in love with a local guy, Jack, stayed, had a daughter Molly, and forged a life as a yoga instructor, farmer’s wife and glue that holds her tight-knit group of friends, who range in age from their twenties into their eighties, together.
Alice’s life may seem small, contained as it is to the environs of one tiny island, but it is rich, full and complete in a way that Lorna’s simply isn’t.
When events lead Lorna, despite considerable misgivings, to go back to Kip, partly at the urging of her daughter Ella who wants to discover the family she has never known, a family who wait amidst a lot of regret, pain and loss, and to which Lorna has no real wish to return.
The Island Home is one of those novels that seems, on the surface of it, to be a light, bright story of fresh starts, redemption, love and hope, and while yes, it is those things in part, and trust me it is good for the beleaguered life-weary soul in ways you never imagine when you start reading it, it is also prepared to go to some dark and painful places in its quest to explore what happens when are deeply injured and can see a way back to any sort of lasting healing.
In other words, Page, who writes with a knowing buoyancy that acknowledges life’s capacity for pain and hurt but its ability to nurture, heal and grow, neither of which are dealt with glibly or lightly, gives us in The Island Home a story of one’s person’s unexpected need to find peace where she finally realises she has none.
Going back to Kip is incredibly hard for Lorna, and with a less assured writer, this tale of starting again might’ve contain many a glossed-over passage where existential terror and pain are acknowledged as being present and accounted for but easily swept away in a tide of new found family connection, friendship, purpose and reawakened life.
It’s a seductive brew and it’s partly what makes books like The Island Home such a compelling read, especially when we can often be left broken and bleeding by the side of the road with no prospect of the world remaking itself in a more whole, welcoming and nurturing image.
We want to believe in closure, in pain being healed, in life knitting itself back together, not simply into one piece, but a piece so wonderfully glowing, vibrant and vivacious that we can scarcely believe we were ever hurting at all.
But life rarely plays itself that way, especially when like Lorna you can have over two decades of separation from family and friends, from your island home and from a whole host of secrets, any of which could sink you if they were let out into the light of day again.
“The five of us work quietly alongside one another, the silence broken every now and then by an instruction from Alice or a burst of chatter between Ella and Molly. When it’s quiet it feels different to the silences that have sat between us throughout this trip, though. It feels a contented kind of quiet, the kind of quiet I always imagined other families taking for granted. As I look around the room at the others working and at the growing pile of sandwiches, a thought enters my mind as quick as a blink. This is my family.” (P. 342-43)
Where The Island Home excels and captures your heart is that while it offers the very real prospect of hope and healing, it doesn’t diminish the pain and loss of the past, and the still-bleeding injuries of the present, by pretending they can be swept away in a new romance or a single conversation or an epiphany high atop a clifftop lighthouse.
For all the rich warmth of the future it holds in store, and make no mistake The Island Home is a novel that celebrates renewal, hope and the restoration of sad and broken things in ways that feel like an enveloping hug long-delayed, this is a story that knows how dark and bleak life can be, and the lingering scars it leaves behind, and which looks them straight in the eye and addresses them without flincing.
Happy ever afters are what we all want and crave, but the ones that matter, the ones that last and don’t break up in a disappointing welter of fairytales spun brokenly apart, come after we have surveyed our pain, held it painfully up in the light of day and dealt with even as we cry with all the things lost and the fear of never locating the things yet to be found.
The Island Home is a rich, beautiful, emotionally substantial gem of a novel which knows life can cut deep and hard and often and that it often makes no apologies or provides no reparations for such grievous acts, but, and this is where your heart will soar after legitimate and hard-won liberation, it can also come alive again in ways you had long given up expecting, especially if you see it in its loved-up and supportively embracing form, and are brave enough to face up to past hurts to find that once-mythical future may not be so fantastically impossible or out of reach anymore.