Sea Room: An Island Life in the Hebrides

Ah, what a fine book this is. Reading it is like spending time with a new friend. Nicholson has a sharp and curious mind and a generous spirit. You may not think you can be much interested in a group of three little islands in the Outer Hebrides - the Shiants - their climate, wildlife, prehistory, geology, archeology, socio-economics, agriculture, shepherding, folk literature, the sea currents around them, and the host of other topics covered in this book, but Nicholson draws you in. Soon you are immersed in whatever there is to be known about what amounts to less than a square mile of rock, cliffs, beach, and meadow. The book is organized around the turn of the year, beginning with Nicholson's first journey to the islands in his own boat in the spring, and ending with the first gusty wet weather of autumn, as he sits at the window in a two-room cottage writing. Into this annual cycle he interweaves story upon story, often speculative, of how the islands came to be, how they came to be what they are, and the people over thousands of years who have lived here. As the year passes, Nicholson sketches in the broad sweep of recorded history from St. Columba to the present, noting the several hands through which the islands have passed, including his father's and his own. A team of archeologists identifies the remains of Iron and Bronze Age settlements and spends a summer uncovering a long abandoned farmstead. The discovery of a buried cobblestone with an ancient inscription sends him on one of many attempts to unravel mysteries that he uncovers. The book is based on considerable research, and Nicholson pieces together a previously unwritten history of the islands with references drawn from many old documents and interviews with historians and other experts. He helpfully illustrates his text with many photographs, drawings, and maps. This book is for anyone who feels the magical pull of islands. You will not regard them quite the same way again.

I feared that I would never manage my dream of living in a remote part of the Outer Hebrides, and then there was "Sea Room." With warmth and tremendous art, Adam Nicolson conveys every sight, every sound, every feeling, and provides facts and insights into every conceivable aspect of this estimable ancient place. His exceptional sensiblilties and his evident passion for full knowledge have led him to tell us not only about the Shiants, but also about ship building (past and present), sailing and seafaring, Gaelic as well as Norse languages, with plenty of legends, folk lore, music and poetry, geology, ornithology - he never stops, never holds back. And the best part is, it feels like reading a long, delightful letter from you dearest friend.

There are many people in the world who daydream about islands, who read about them, who travel to them, for whom islands possess a powerful, magnetic pull---Adam Nicolson, whose father gifted him with the Shiant Islands on his 21st birthday, has written a book for all of us who have wished time and again for our own special island...but before we all break into a chorus of "Bali H'ai," let me warn you that Mr. Nicolson's islands, the Shiants, just off the coast of the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, are anything but tropical, and far from daydream or fiction. Sea Room, while written without any overt romantic sensibility, nevertheless tugs at the heart-strings in a profound way which I'm having trouble describing to people... It's deeply-grounded in the gritty details of life in the Isles: poverty, isolation, the harsh climate, the difficulty in trade, transportation, and health care, the underlying controversies over the very idea of ownership of land and wilderness. It's just as strong in describing the strengths of family and interconnected community ties, the deep roots of regional history and archaeology, the spine-shiver of local legends, the sense of "otherness" which in Celtic lands is as close as the other side of your shadow...Perhaps the true beauty of this book lies in this paradox: in focusing so tightly on so small a subject, a place about which he cares so passionately, Nicolson touches something universal, creating something accessible (and engaging) to the wide, wide world. The language is lovely; the Islands are lovelier. And Nicolson's eldest son, who will be gifted with the Shiants in a year or two, is one lucky man.

Adam Nicolson has invited us to his little islands of the Hebrides, the Shiants, in a fine book, _Sea Room: An Island Life in the Hebrides_ (North Point Press). He writes: "I love the Shiants for all their ragged, harsh and delicate glory and this book is a love letter to them." It is one of the most persuasive love letters ever written. He knows the islands better than anyone ever has, and has conveyed what he knows in one fascinating chapter after another. There is plenty of intense pleasure he conveys about living on the islands themselves, but his love is not blind; within the pages about his season here are also large quantities of battering waves, rain, cold, inconvenience, and the droppings of rats and sheep. It is all described with a passionate attention to detail. He writes lovingly of other people, like the boatwright who builds him a Viking-inspired sailboat in which he can commute the 16 miles to his island, or the friends he visits on the mainland who insist on cleaning his clothes and his person when he visits, or even the local press that caricatures him as a bowler-wearing aristocrat supremely out of place. For further details on his islands, he has enlisted the help of various experts. For instance, from Czechoslovakia comes a team of archeologists to study one of the ruined houses on the islands. When they find a carve stone, he trucks it all over the British Isles, so that we get to learn the geology of the stone, the philosophy of hermits a millennium ago, and how such a stone might do for either a grave marker or a pillow. Within the excavation is also a binding strip, probably from a Bible, but Nicolson shows that "the replacement with a printed Gaelic Bible of a nurtured ancient stone was a symptom not of godliness but of empire, imposition, control and a sort of shrinking of life." People farmed on the islands for two millennia with a relatively good living. Nicolson's meticulous gathering of as much as can be known about the islands' history, however, shows that the insularity which was no obstacle for Vikings and hermits became a liability in the modern world where the Shiants had no closeness to markets and no access to the materials of modern civilization. Self-sufficiency was enough before 1600, but after 1800 there was no permanent inhabitation. Nicolson writes with humility about his ownership, which he realizes is due to chance. His father bought the islands, and gave them to him on his twenty-first birthday, and he will in turn give them to his son on his twenty-first. He displays the contingencies of theft, war, and murder by which we claim a parcel of earth as our own. He knows that in a larger sense the shepherds are closer to possessing the islands by gaining a living from them than he is having a simple deed of ownership. But he makes the case that his islands can do very well in an enlightened private ownership which recognizes that they are the possessions of the area and of the world.