Magic of Mayo island encapulated in new children's book

BOOK REVIEW:

Adventure on Achill Island by Peter Killeen

(London Books Publishers)

This is a book for children, and its title, Adventure on Achill Island, immediately tells you it is part of a long tradition of children’s stories that bring together two things that have been important to children’s literature since it first emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, and which complement each other: adventures, sometimes called quest narratives, and islands.

The history of children’s literature is full of these kinds of books.

There are novels like Robinson Crusoe (one man has to survive alone on a desert island), or The Swiss Family Robinson (one family has to survive alone on a desert island), or The Coral Island (three boys have to survive alone on a desert island).

You’ll can see a theme developing here. Or even…The Lord of the Flies, slightly more adult this, but it involves a whole classroom full of boys getting through a plane crash this time, who have to survive alone on a desert island. Let’s say, things don’t work out so well for those guys. Or think of Swallows and Amazons, where a bunch of children decide to spend their summer on a small uninhabited island in the Lake District, to have some adventures for themselves.

Very often in these stories, there is some treasure involved, such as, for example, in Treasure Island, probably the most famous adventure story for children set on an island.

Treasure Island is by Robert Louis Stevenson, who when he was a child loved reading about adventure stories set on islands, just as his father as a child had loved tales of high adventures along the British coastline, and he later said that it should be mandatory that all children read about adventures set on islands.

In fact he claimed that you couldn’t really be a child if you didn’t like reading about adventure stories on islands.

Thinking of Treasure Island reminded me that that classic novel begins with a map of the island where the adventures will take place, and also reminded me that writers used to attach maps to their adventure novels so that it would be easier for their readers to imagine themselves on the terrain of adventure (you can find a map at the start of many classic adventure stories, including King Solomon’s Mines, and The Lord of the Rings, or Ursala Le Guin’s Earthsea novels, or even the map of the Hundred Acre’s Wood in the Winnie the Pooh stories).

So, I was delighted to find, when reading my father's adventure story about a bunch of children looking for treasure on an island, we start with a map. Like all those other maps, this is partly real, but also a bit fantastical: as he says, while the plan of Achill as it is represented in the story is mostly geographically accurate, there is some poetic licence taken as well, and a bit of invention never hurt a story about strange happenings on an island.

Much like the novels in which they appear, maps too tell stories. By showing us the shape of the land, they build on our imagination, inviting us into these fictional worlds.

When you are reading this book, don’t skip the map because it is important to following the story you are about to follow. The illustrations by Dianne Breen help this process as well – they don’t provide too many details, but just enough to encourage the reader to follow their own imaginations further.

So, you can see that we like our adventure stories to take place on islands. I’ve already mentioned a long list of adventure stories for children which are set on an island of some kind, but even in something more contemporary, such as, for example, the television programme called Survivor, what usually happens is that participants are isolated on an island and given a set of tasks to perform or obstacles to overcome to prove themselves worthy winners.

Islands obviously fascinate us. In a children’s book, being quarantined on an island, away from parents and other authority figures, and having to work things out for yourself, is basic to the whole idea of an adventure.

We like to read about them or watch them because we think of islands as isolated places, away from normal, everyday life and therefore exotic, strange, challenging, and full of possibility.

Islands are places where the imagination, especially the imagination of children, can be free of everyday limitations and push itself to its limits.

Now, of course, Achill Island is not in the South Seas, it is not a coral island, although, if we tried really hard I suppose we could imagine it as an tropical location.

But for the four children in Adventure on Achill Island, Edward, Carmel, Tony and Katie – it is still a mysterious place, somewhere new and strange, different from the places of their ordinary lives.

These children are on Achill because they are on holiday, one family from Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire, one from Castlebar (we might feel sorry for the Castlebar family who don’t get to go very far for their adventure).

While on the island, they soon ditch their parents (you can’t have an adventure when your parents are around, as parents are spoilsports whose job it is to stop you having adventures because they are always too dangerous), and they suddenly find that Achill is actually far more glamorous and exotic than it might have appeared on first glance.

In the first place, it has all kinds of mysterious and even frightening places on it, like a deserted village, which may or may not be haunted, it has a dark history – references here of the Clew Bay disaster of the 14th June, 1894, when 32 people drowned after the boat they were on capsized while ferrying harvesters from Achill Island to Westport.

It has places on it with strange, outlandish names like Dugort and Bull’s Mouth. It has houses with secret passages leading to the coast, which may remind the reader of histories of smugglers and pirates off the west coast of Ireland.

And it even has an entire cast of what are, after all, the 1980’s equivalent of the smugglers and pirates of Treasure Island, an international gang of drug runners, who are prepared to kidnap, terrify, and possibly even murder the children of the story in order to enrich themselves.

It also has a cast of characters who come from very far-off locations like Mexico. There are references to remote places like Valladolid in Spain, and to people like Christopher Columbus and his journey (his adventure) in discovering America. There is a sub-plot involving a gold statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe that is essentially the treasure on the island that everyone is trying to get hold of.

And most importantly, there is a chance for the children to prove themselves, to defeat the smugglers and kidnappers, entrap them, beat them at their own game, and prove themselves far more ingenious and clever than the various members of the Gardaí and even Interpol, who are, it seems, next to clueless when it comes to capturing international criminals.

Towards the end of almost every episode of the popular Scooby-Doo cartoon, the criminal mastermind who has been unmasked by the intrepid crew of Fred, Daphne, Velma, Shaggy and Scooby (a kind of animated famous five) says something like: “I would have gotten away with it if it wasn’t for you meddling kids,” and the same is true here, where the meddling kids, who just want to have an adventure to enliven their holidays on Achill Island, run rings around their enemies.

Adventure stories always move quickly, and the pace of the plot is at least as important as characterisation, setting and other elements, and this is certainly true of the Adventure on Achill Island.

These kinds of stories are actually very important for children to read as they grow up. They involve quests, or what academics sometimes call the ‘hero’s journey’, which has been around since cavemen started telling stories to themselves.

The formula is instantly recognisable, in which a hero or group of heroes go out of their everyday world or their everyday lives and into battle with the forces of evil, whether they are monstrous, supernatural agents, or more straightforwardly human criminals, instruments of chaos who need to be overcome so that order can be restored. The child characters must defeat the powers of darkness, win a decisive victory, and return home as heroes, and having gained wisdom from their experiences.

In The Adventure on Achill Island, the pace is brisk but never breathless or underwritten. It ebbs and flows like the sea, in an almost respiratory cycle of action and reflection that is very easy to read.

The chapters are short and crisp, ending with an evocative closing line which also sets up the next chapter, usually some form of cliffhanger and/or new crisis.

The sense of place throughout is strongly evoked.

The characters are a varied lot, from the unmitigated villain, Eric Davies, who almost comes to a sticky end in the marsh, to the salty sea captain McNamara, who appears to know everything about the history of Achill Island, and much else besides, to the children themselves, who react to events in a generally realistic but confident way.

Adventure on Achill Island is ultimately a coming-of-age story, and I can recommend the book for everyone looking for some pre-social media excitement this Christmas.