In the summer of 1937 Adam Nicolson’s father, Nigel, bought the Shiant Isles from one Colonel Macdonald for the sum of 1400 pounds. Nigel eventually bestowed the three Hebridean islands on his son Adam, and Adam plans in turn to gift them to his son, Tom.
I use the word, “gift,” rather than “give,” purposefully here because the islands represent far more than three pieces of real estate just off the coast of Lewis. They are weighted with history, memory, and the kind of holiness that comes only with an intense love of the land. Like the Viking torc found in the Shiant seas, the gift of these islands carries a wish for an alliance and a connection — a hope that Adam’s son and the visitors who are always welcome there will see in the islands what Adam sees and cherish them in part for the reasons he cherishes them.
The book, Sea Room, is, in kind, Nicolson’s gift to the reader. It is an exploration of the interwoven dimensions of the islands, from their botany, ornithology, and geology to their habitation, legend, and archeology. The book, however, is far more than a travelogue or description of place. It is a meditation crafted with such skill and thoughtfulness that each time I have read the work, I have taken at least a month to read it…. Time must be spent in rereading passages that seem so right that I wonder why I’ve never thought to view things in just that way. Time must be spent gazing inwardly — picturing the sheep hunkering in the driving rain, or the “branched orchids” and “stars of tormentil” hedging thick in the summer grass.
As with most gifted writers, Nicolson is a man you have mental conversations with. Turning the pages of Sea Room, I imagine myself sitting with the author before the fire, discussing how it is possible to know a place so well that its stones and rivulets and sounds seem a pattern in the blood. “I have felt at times,” Nicolson says in his opening paragraphs, that there is “no gap between me and the place. I have absorbed it and been absorbed by it, as if I have had no existence apart from it. I have been shaped by those island times….”
“Me too!” I would exclaim. “I knew the high mountain ranges where I spent the first twenty years of my life in that same way.” And then I’d say, “Remember where Tennyson says ‘I am a part of all that I have met/Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough/Gleams that untraveled world whose margin fades/Forever and forever when I move…?’”
What makes Sea Room so special is that Nicolson, as he lays each aspect of the islands over another, moves from the particular to the universal so easily. He provides an arch through which the reader may review and reassess his own experiences.
One of my favorite parts of the book is where Nicolson describes the puffins with their “stiff and predictable” sociability and ritual “dance of stamping feet.” Another favorite is the place where he muses about the ship builder John MacAulay. His “austerity,” Nicolson says, “lay like an acid on the page.” It “was a guarantee of his seriousness.” Nicolson has MacAulay build a ship for him so that , rather than being ferried to the Shiants, Nicolson can sail to them himself. For “an island,” he says, “can only be known and understood if the sea around it is known and understood.” This makes perfect sense to me.
In its comprehensive approach to the Shiants, to island life and a way of perception and recollection, Sea Room is an enrichment and, I think, a contemplative experience that the reader will long remember.
— For a link to Adam Nicolson’s Shiant webpage, please see "Sites I Visit" further down on the blog.
