An Island by Karen Jennings - review

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Title: An Island

Author: Karen Jennings

Genre: Literary Fiction/Modern fable

Pages: 119

My rating: ★★★☆☆

Other notable works by author: Finding Soutbek

Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2021.

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Samuel, an old lighthouse keeper, lives by himself on an island, almost entirely self-sufficient except for supplies he receives by boat twice a week, his only contact with the outside world. One day, the sea washes onto his shore a half-dead young man – a refugee. Samuel’s solitudinous lifestyle is pierced, and so too are his thoughts. Memories of his life on the mainland plague Samuel day and night, and start to threaten his current reality.

A highly political novel which explores themes such as, land ownership, racism and xenophobia, dictatorship, rebellion, colonisation and refugees, Jennings’ novel, despite being the least known of the Booker Prize, holds its’ own against the other contestants.

Despite being a relatively short novel, at only 119 pages, Jennings manages to build a realistically suspenseful story as we see Samuel’s fragile mind battle with paranoia and confusion upon the arrival of a refugee to his island. It was well-written enough that even I started to doubt what the true intentions of the young man were, and whether he really was a threat to Samuel. Interspersed between these island moments, are flashbacks to Samuel’s previous life as his unnamed country underwent political turmoil and upheaval. Samuel, despite being extremely passive and weak-willed, gets caught up in the middle of it all and we see the fight for independence, dictatorship, a failed democracy, all through the eyes of an unwilling participant, an average Joe.

It’s a fable with important and well-written themes, and although I think it deserves its place on the Booker shortlist, for some reason it didn't particularly move me as much as it should have and I neither loved it nor hated it.