Book Review: The Island by Victoria Hislop (Spinalonga)

I first became interested in Victoria Hislop's debut novel, The Island, when I visited the island of the title, Spinalonga of Crete, in June this year. Visiting Spinalonga was one of the most fascinating aspects of my trip. It is a small but beautiful island with a sad and unique history. The boat across to the island is about 10 minutes from the town of Elounda, to the east of Crete. We spent several hours exploring the island, the remainders of the houses there, and the small museum. The island, the landscape and the architecture are a photographer's dream- it's full of beautiful wild flowers, the ruins of a fortress, and abandoned houses.

Spinalonga, or the island of tears, was a Venetian fortress until it became a leper colony from 1903 - 1957. People who contracted leprosy in Crete during that time were sent to live on Spinalonga as a quarantine measure. Spinalonga residents received help from the government in terms of food and healthcare, with doctors regularly visiting the island. As the island became more populated the inhabitants created a community and married, went to school, owned shops and traded with mainland Crete.

In The Island, Victoria Hislop tells the story of Alexis Fielding and her search for her family history after a generation of secrecy. Alexis visits Crete and, along with the reader, learns the story of her mother and grandmother's past that has been kept so hidden from her. She uncovers many family secrets along the way, including murder, infidelity, the effects of the second world war and, inevitably, leprosy. The plot itself is a strength, and on that basis, along with its cultural impact on the Cretan people, The Island was made into the Greek TV series To Nisi. It's hard to find online, but I managed to find the first episode with English subtitles, and it was excellent. Much better than the book!

The Island is a good book to take on a trip to Crete if you are interested in the history of Spinalonga. You can trace Alexis' steps into Spinalonga yourself, and although the book was written in 2005, many of the descriptions of the island are still accurate, for example, when entering Spinalonga, on your right, the church is still there. When the leper colony closed in the 1950s and the last inhabitants left the island, Spinalonga remained as it was, the homes of the inhabitants left intact. Today the island is a tourist attraction for many visitors to Crete.

As a former travel writer, Hislop's talent lies more in the style of storytelling. Many of the descriptions are simple and fall flat, where a more emotive or original turn of phrase should have been used to help create atmosphere. As someone who enjoys editing, I wanted to take a red pen to an awful lot of the text. The dialogue is particularly bad, although fortunately it is used sparingly. When characters speak, instead of gaining a personality, they loose one. Their dialogue doesn't seem natural, they speak what the reader already knows, and their speech adds nothing to the reader's understanding. Aside from dialogue, the attempts at metaphor are cliche and over-used. Often it reads like a schoolchild's creative writing exercise. I would only recommend this book to those whose desire to learn more about Spinalonga is strong enough to conquer the effects of reading bad writing.

If you'd like to know more about The Island, I'd recommend listening to Victoria Hislop on BBC Radio 4's Book Club, which you can listen to here. I enjoyed hearing her talk about the different characters in the novel and why she wrote a novel and not a travel writing feature.

I'll finish this post with some photos taken on Spinalonga, in June of this year. It really was a beautiful place to visit. In the following photos you can see the remains of the houses the inhabitants lived in, the landscape and the clear blue sea.