After a spectacularly successful entry into the world of fiction with her 2019 debut novel When All Is Said, and a solid follow-up with Listening Still, Anne Griffin returns with her third novel, The Island Of Longing.
When we first meet Rosie Driscoll, she has moved back to Roaring Bay Island, the island where she grew up, working as the skipper on her father’s ferry, Aoibhneas. Rosie’s father is getting too old to manage the boat by himself and her childhood rival Liam is trying to force a hostile takeover.
Rosie has her own reasons for being home. She is trying to come to terms with the disappearance of her 17-year-old daughter Saoirse, eight years previously, and the buckling of her marriage under the grief. She now has to reckon with what everyone else already believes – that Saoirse is never coming home.
But this is a much more abstract story than that suggests. The Island Of Longing is an impressionistic rendering of what, over three novels, has become Griffin’s preferred subject matter – loss and grief, what they do to us as human beings, how they change us, and how we survive.
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The book is structured in three traditional parts with the additional, unusual device of a single sentence between each chapter, which gradually reveals the story of what happened to Saoirse. It is an emotionally affecting device (I approached these sentences with a sense of dread for Saoirse) that also adds tension to the overall narrative.
The book is full of what are by now Griffin’s trademarks – gentle humour, and a large cast of quirky characters that make up the large communities and families that she writes about so well. She gives them depth and authenticity through the ordinary detail of their lives.
Griffin shows admirable restraint in choosing to tell this story quietly, never reaching for drama, never taking the obvious choices, and bringing the story to a satisfying close that feels just right.
Her appeal has always been her compassionate perspective on the human condition and The Island of Longing is her most emotionally complex book yet. Gently heartbreaking, but also hopeful and uplifting. An insight into the fragility of the human condition and what holds us together when we break.
