Reviews - Sea Room: An Island Life in the Hebrides

29 reviews for:

Sea Room: An Island Life in the Hebrides

Adam Nicolson

3.75 AVERAGE

leifalreadyexists's review against another edition

3.0

What happens when an aristocrat inherits a beautiful, severe, historic and largely uninhabited Hebridean island? Best case scenario: this book. Nicolson clearly loves and cares for the Shiants, as is reflected here, but his work is marred by his feud with the local Scots who quarrel with an Englishman's sole ownership of the isles (a right and proper complaint, as Nicholson himself notes, as is their complaint against sole ownership of land), but also and more grievously by his egotism and casual but deeply ingrained sexism. The water is masculine, the land feminine? All boating is a man's world; all domestication, a woman's? Rubbish. This reeks of personal history, poorly thought out assumptions and badly read history, which is all the more startling given Nicolson's own wonderful readings of archaeology within this book. Instead, his sexism seems to reflect his own domestic quarrels with his first wife and second, as well as with the women who have either lived on the island or who have refused to travel there.

But what is good about Sea Room? It is passionate and resourceful, enlivening even the dullest moments of archaeological history with a thrilling and deeply imagined vision of the lives of the Shiant islanders throughout the isles' existence. Nicolson tells three stories, essentially: the frame narrative is one of his commissioning and use of a small, Viking-era personal boat from a local craftsman to get to and from the isles. The second stories is of his commissioning of an archaeological study of the isles: this makes up the bulk of the text, although Nicolson frames it as a deep history of the isles instead of the result of his commissioned study. And the third narrative running through the text is one of Nicolson's ownership of the isles: his relationship with his son, who inherited the island, with his father, who gave the isles to him, with the neighbours who think it unjust that he owns them, and with the local stewards / sheep herders whom he works with to house sheep on the island.

Together, these strands of passion make up a richly imagined, albeit marred vision of a place in the world that would otherwise go largely unnoticed, and that is a prize worth the effort. No question. What should be questioned is why such a beautiful task can only be accomplished by an aristocrat with a personal history of wealth and connections, and whose primary relationship to the island -- as much as he hides it from himself and from this book -- is pecuniary: his money pays for it, pays for the studies, pays for the boat, pays for the stewards services... all revolve around Nicholson's social privilege and inherited capital, which is indelibly tied to the patriarchal structures of wealth and patronizing visions of others. And that is a shame, because this kind of beautiful imagination is common property to all, as should be the land that is brought to life through history in this fashion.