Island Dreams: Mapping an Obsession

Island Dreams: Mapping an Obsession by Gavin Francis was a psychological trip into my own island obsession. I read eerie similarities between the author and myself in analyzing our mutual preference for taking holidays to insular destinations. I had a feeling that I would be reading deep into my own mind when I encountered, on the very first page, the author’s earliest memories of visiting libraries and what he enjoyed most about them:

“Thinking of islands often returns me in memory to the municipal library I visited as a child. The library was one of the grandest buildings in town–entered directly from the street through heavy brass doors, each one tessellated in panes of glass thick as lenses. By age eight or nine I’d exhausted the children’s library and been given an adult borrower’s ticket. But as my mother browsed the shelves, often as not I’d sit down on the scratchy carpet tiles and open an immense atlas, running my fingers over distant and unreachable archipelagos as if reading Braille. I hardly dared hope I’d reach any of them; that I have reached a few is something of a relief. And so the love of islands has always, for me, been inextricable from the love of maps.”

Francis and I shared the exact same story, although I was a little older when I discovered the National Geographic Atlas of the World. What draws us to these destinations? Surely there are other places that are just as interesting yet easier to get to. Why spend extra time and expense hightailing it to a dot in the water? Francis elaborates on a possible answer:

“But through adolescence, medical school, and working as a doctor in speciality training, it began to dawn on me that I sought out islands to recalibrate my sense of what matters. Their absence of connection, their isolation, was therapeutic in a way I found difficult to articulate.”

During my travelogue presentations on my trips to Tristan da Cunha, I give a brief history of the island and my particular attraction to it. Knowing that people who attend my shows are there to see photos from my trips and not to sit there listening to some guy talking in front of a blank screen, in my opening monologue I defer to the excuse “I’d have to lie down on a psychiatrist’s couch in order to explain in depth my psychological attraction to islands as vacation destinations”. For Francis is correct: it is difficult to articulate the reasons we find islands so appealing. I find it therapeutic as well, as I use islands as a way to get away from people and the proverbial hustle and bustle of my everyday life. How else to explain my penchant for visiting isolated islands or ones that have low populations? You don’t find me taking trips to Indonesia, Japan or the Philippines, for example. Yet my own travel blog is filled with vacation reports–and often repeated trips–spent in the Åland Islands, Ile de Batz, Bornholm, Christiansø, the Faroe Islands, Grímsey, Iceland, McNabs Island, Nightingale Island, Pelee Island, Tristan da Cunha, Vardø, and Vestmannaeyjar. Last year I had planned a trip to Europe which included a stop in the Isle of Man.

While I have to use vacation time to visit these islands, Francis was a doctor and made his obsession a part of his job by taking temporary medical assignments to remote islands the world over. In Island Dreams, we follow him as he travels the world but his story is not a chronological narrative. In fact, his book is heavy on the maps and low on the text. The book is only 246 pages long but printed on thick paper–perhaps in homage to the exploration maps of centuries ago. Francis gave the reading experience the conscious feeling of containment, as the text was descriptive and informative yet brief, captured on pages with wide margins and headers and footers. Pages therefore resembled islands of text surrounded by moats of margins. The words themselves were contained, as I never saw a hyphenated word split across two pages and with rare exception each page ended with complete sentences, anchored by periods.

Francis wrote some evocative descriptions of his travels, such as this memory of the aurora borealis:

“A wash of swirling luminescence rose and fell, like marbled endpapers spread over the book of the sea.”

While visiting the Andaman Islands, my temples started to throb when Francis wrote:

“On the ground the heat was like a migraine, pounding and shimmering, fracturing the light.”

Francis filled his book with maps, almost all of which were historical in context and thus may not have even referred to the places he was discussing by their current names. Maps flanked the text so the reader never had to flip ahead or back to find out where he was writing about. Some maps weren’t even in English. In spite of these forms of disguise, I found it a pleasure to try to find the islands from these small maps, as it wasn’t always easy and I often used a magnifying glass. It is fitting that he used Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island as the map on the book cover; each antiquated map Francis supplied yielded its own treasure to the reader with the patience to search within it.

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How Iceland Changed the World: The Big History of a Small Island

How Iceland Changed the World: The Big History of a Small Island by Egill Bjarnason was published in 2021. It’s a popular new book about an old subject: history. Iceland has been the hottest spot on the planet to visit for the past ten years. I myself have been there three times between 2013 and 2018 (not counting airline transfers at Keflavík) so it’s a good time to publish a new history book for English readers. I found it to be so much more interesting than History of Iceland: From the Settlement to the Present Day, which, in spite of my fondness for all things Nordic, I found to be so crushingly dull.

The title is an exaggeration, as world events recounted in lengthy detail such as the French Revolution, the foundation of Israel and the moon landing all would have taken place without Iceland’s minuscule role. It is Egill’s charm in making his homeland’s level of involvement seem all the more dramatic on the world stage. Egill wrote this book originally in English, so it was not weighed down by the potential awkwardness of a substandard translation. He wrote a chronological history which was broken down by subject matter, starting with chapters entitled The Discovery of the West, then The Medieval Legacy, moving on to other historical topics such as Nationalism, World War II, The Moon Landing, The Cold War and ending with Gender Equality. What made Egill’s book such a can’t-put-down read was its humour and Egill’s–perhaps his knowing representation of all Icelanders–willingness to laugh at himself.

Egill’s humour was not confined to jokes or snappy punchlines, but rather in his ability to tell a funny story. I found myself quoting him at length, for the laughter he elicited is lost unless I reproduce entire paragraphs. The author shows that ignorant tourists (both real and faux) can be as idiotic as some of the stalwarts of Icelandic history like Vikings and temperamental volcanoes. His humour never deflected from the seriousness at hand, which included the revelation that Eva Braun had visited Iceland in 1939 before the outbreak of World War II. Egill even pointed out that colour film footage of her trip is available on YouTube.

This style of writing history wasn’t irreverent and has enough laughs and personal asides to keep you turning the pages. To get an idea of the kind of history book Egill wrote, I include the following passages. They were my favourite parts and I still smile as I reread them:

“Well-meaning tourists asked questions that ranged from baffling to mildly insulting, like whether the country had enough educated people to run a functioning government. Each visitor seemed to have a pre-conceived narrative of what Iceland was. Iceland the alien planet. Iceland the frozen wasteland. Iceland the expensive playground. Iceland the Viking fortress.”

“Iceland’s first history book, The Book of Settlements, tells the story of Ingólfur, and then goes on to detail the names and farm holdings of the thousands of settlers who came after him. This was a kind of Viking VIP list written by the country’s first nerd, Ari the Learned, to highlight the country’s respectable genealogy–to show that it was populated by more than slaves and murderers.”

“Hekla’s two most powerful eruptions, those of 1104 and 1300, brought a cloud of ash flying over northern Europe like a guerrilla marketing campaign for doomsday: Hell is real! So you’d better come to church.”

“Earlier expedition leaders had skimmed the landscape in comparison, and taken a degree of liberty with their recollections, recounting tales of crossing bridges made of whalebone and meeting locals who lived to be 150 years old. Facts did not get in their way. Their goal was to feed a market hungry for historical and geographical publications, the most common category of nonreligious books since the invention of the printing press. Iceland was the exotic North, and there was hardly anyone around to correct false claims. Rarely was there documented proof that an author had ever actually visited the country, and typically each publication was influenced by previously printed books, the myths repeated again and again. Icelanders living in Denmark tried to dispel the rumors, but the most popular ‘facts’ came back like zombies: two books published fifty years apart by Dithmar Blefken (in Dutch) and Olaus Magnus (in Swedish) claim, respectively, that Icelanders live for up to 150 to 300 years–because of the pure climate, of course. Which I’d say is fair reasoning: the human body is organic, and we all know that vegetables and other organic things last longer in the fridge.”

“So in the spring of 1939, when the uptight Dr. Gerlach arrived in the world’s northernmost capital, he struggled to make friends with anyone other than German nationals living in Iceland and a few long-standing German allies. Gerlach was described as one of the best pathologists in Europe, but his devotion to the Nazi Party got him fired from his university in Switzerland. In return, his promotion within the Nazi Party was swift. He was invited to serve the Third Reich in Iceland, a place of ‘high culture.’ What an honor! Imagine the anticipation of a Nazi who’d been promised he could work with ‘pure’ Aryans. His voyage was like that of a kid heading to an actual unicorn ranch, only to be stabbed by a horn.”

“Anyone without a criminal record can run for president, as long as they are above the constitutional age limit of thirty-five, which is (as everyone knows) the age when one finally starts acting more presidential–the age when one can hear the words open bar without waking up hungover behind a dumpster the next morning.”

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Your Move: What Board Games Teach Us About Life

In Your Move: What Board Games Teach Us About Life, Joan Moriarity & Jonathan Kay spend as much time writing about tabletop games as they do about the personalities and psychological makeup of their players, and how game theory can affect the world at large. I was more attracted to the chapters by Moriarity, who interacts daily with players at a Toronto gaming café and witnesses the behaviours exhibited by a wide range of customers. By her own admission, she surprises herself by what reactions game players exhibit versus what she believes they should be exhibiting. Case in point: the most politically incorrect game around today, Cards Against Humanity:

“Another curious thing about Cards Against Humanity is the people who choose to play it. I have spent years observing people selecting and playing games so I think I have a better sense than most about which games reach which target audiences. For a long time, I assumed it must be straight, white, cisgender dudes driving the game’s massive success. As the years went by, I began to notice something about the people at the café who came to me looking for help finding a copy of it: roughly nine in ten were women, and about half of those were women of color. Obviously, I do not know and cannot know the exact reasons why people choose to play any particular game but I thought my experience had provided me with ample basis for making educated guesses. What I saw went against who I supposed this game was for and how it was meant to be enjoyed. I wondered who these women could be punching down at. Their queer friends? Their trans friends? That did not seem likely.”

I have played this game many times and only within a group of other gay men. As one of the targeted groups within this nasty deck of cards, we can’t help laughing at the obvious antigay slant some of the cards display. I have attended comedy shows put on by gay and lesbian comedians, and their jokes are full of queer stereotypes that a straight comedian would lose his or her career over. We can laugh at the homophobic biases because we know that they are so totally not true or are surreal exaggerations. On a related note, there are some Jewish comedians who can tell anti-Semitic jokes that gentile comedians could never do (and Joan Rivers had been the bane of the Anti-Defamation League on more than one occasion). So I do not agree with the theory that Cards Against Humanity allows its players to be “horrible people” by being openly racist, sexist, homophobic and so on. The game is not unleashing the closet anti-Semite in all of us. We are not laughing at others, but ridiculing ourselves instead when we play it.

I enjoyed Moriarity’s teaching style and her insight into gamer personalities and I believe that under her tutelage I might become a convert to fantasy or empire-building games. My gaming preference has always been the wordy types: Scrabble, Probe, Balderdash, Hangman or any of the other Scrabble-inspired or -derived tile games like Anagrams and Fry Your Brain. I do play other games, such as Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit, but of all the games Moriarity and Kay talked about in this book, Greenland (a survival game) has piqued my interest the most to want to play it and now I am looking on-line to find out where I might buy it.

Irony alert as chapter five was entitled “Cures for Pandemics and Alpha Players”, where Moriarity dealt with the game called Pandemic (this book was published in September 2019, which leads me to wonder if COVID-19 will inspire anyone to develop a game based on its worldwide spread) as well as how to deal with know-it-all players who ruin everyone’s experience by dominating the game table.

The authors referred to their own essays as well as each other’s, both ones already encountered and ones yet to come, and this must have required a massive editing collaboration to ensure that what they said was later covered, or had been dealt with earlier. Thus although the authors stated at the beginning that each of the game essays could be read independently and that jumping around the book skipping chapters was perfectly all right, there was nonetheless a tight sense of cohesion where chapters flowed well together. I would recommend reading the book from cover to cover.

By far the best chapter was Moriarity’s Scattergories and Sacrilege, where she pummelled the card game as a friendship breaker and family un-maker:

“It is often labeled a ‘party game’ but that implies a party-like atmosphere. Gregarious fun, rollicking hijinks, that sort of thing. Scattergories is more like being stuck in detention with nothing to do but your homework. Players sit quietly with their papers and pens, writing without talking to each other, without interacting or even looking at each other. They might as well be doing their taxes. This part of Scattergories is a silent, joyless chore.”

Kay wrote one of the most poignant lines that introverted social misfits like me can identify with:

“Board gaming in general…is the only thing I do in life that allows me to fuse fully my desire for intellectual stimulation with the inborn human appetite for some form of social connection.”

Some style notes I must comment on: I abhor the lazy suffix -wise, which my local weather forecaster uses excessively with the sentences always beginning “Temperaturewise…” I admit that the beauty of the English language allows its speakers to understand what neologisms like this mean without the excesses of circuitous prepositional phrases. A word like this might go over better in an oral context, but on the printed page, I would prefer to see “As for the temperature…” Kay was guilty of two such -wise monstrosities. I let the first one go without putting it in my notes, but by the time I encountered the second occurrence:

“Hobby-wise, board gaming is more properly described as a confederation of sub-communities…”

I had to note it. The -wise suffix is inelegant on the printed page and should be avoided in neologisms.

Unfortunately the end of the book disappointed me with two errors within its last two paragraphs. These mistakes ruined an otherwise pleasant read with a bang-bang effect of successive erroneous words:

“…those same people are have already shown their willingness to actually get together…”

and:

“So maybe it’s good that there are all those various communities are there, playing among various kinds of people.”

This kind of error, where it seems more likely that the author changed tense or verb placement while the original wording or part thereof was left in, was found elsewhere in the book, but I did not note it. The editor in me felt that I could let those instances pass, but not twice in the final two paragraphs. 

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