Volume LIV Number 5
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Books
A World of Isolatoes
Islands: A Trip through Space and Time, by Peter Conrad; Thames & Hudson, 2009, 192 pages, $45.
Islands are philosophically odd things: they were central to Locke’s bold moves against feudal tenure rights in the eighteenth century which made property transferable from the physical effort put into finding, cultivating and ultimately consuming its produce. Islands are more easily marked by such activities: that is why Shakespeare sets Prospero on one, and Defoe has Robinson Crusoe take possession of his. Islands were a new standard of independence in laying claim to the biggest parcel of land of all, the United States, which is manifestly no island. And they have their unbargained for “subtleties”, as Prospero called them—the power of generating noises, apparitions and events on their own account. Their very names—Bermuda, St Kilda, Ceylon, Spitsbergen—are of great imaginative potency. Islands are subtle enough to become individuals. And not only that: they can become rafts of righteousness—close enough to the “world” for observations to be cast at it, and far enough away from it to evade responsibility for the effect of the said observations.
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