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The second novel from one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists is a study of power, exile and dislocation
From Robinson Crusoe onwards, the literary island is always a microcosm. Islands, the smaller and more isolated the better, offer novelists the conveniences of the closed room, the small scale; politics distilled to a manageable number of characters; the distance between cause and effect, behaviour and consequences, necessarily and usefully short. Strangers at the Port by Lauren Aimee Curtis, one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists, is set on an island where patriarchy has gone a little beyond realism – rather like Sophie Mackintosh’s The Water Cure, though it stops short of Mackintosh’s outright dystopia.
The island is unnamed but firmly located near Sicily by reference to The Odyssey and the Napoleonic War. The historical setting at first seems unsettled. Subsistence farming, homespun clothes and lo-tech living suggest a range of several centuries, and the vaguely archaic diction of the opening pages indicates earlier times. As the detail accumulates – a quarry, soldiers, a gramophone, a man in a yacht – it seems to imply a specific set of events off stage, but the narrative remains coy about its relationship to global affairs. The grape harvest fails. A prison colony comes and goes. At the end, the inhabitants emigrate to Australia on overcrowded and insanitary ships, at which point the well-informed reader might see that the story unfolds in the context of the phylloxera epidemic which destroyed the Mediterranean wine trade and triggered mass migration in the late 19th century.
