Hugh Thomson
One Man in a Boat
The Summer Isles: A Voyage of the Imagination
By Philip Marsden
Granta Books 352pp £20 order from our bookshop
Philip Marsden’s new book is subtitled ‘A Voyage of the Imagination’. During the course of his voyage, he incorporates some intriguing thoughts about Celtic mythology and the splits it reveals in the ‘fabric of the world’. But this is really just literary window-dressing. At heart, this is a tale of good old-fashioned adventure, and all the better for it.
Marsden decides to take a 31-foot sloop from Cornwall to the Summer Isles, off northwest Scotland, and to do it the hard way – not up the sheltered Irish Sea (‘for pussies’, an old sea dog tells him), but along the Atlantic coast of Ireland, with its treacherous islands and rocks.
While a competent sailor, he is not an experienced one, so the reader will share the state of continual mild anxiety he describes as he makes his way north single-handedly in a relatively small boat. Halyards jam, the wind gets up and the hull starts taking in water
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
On the night of 5th July 1809, a group of soldiers kidnapped Pope Pius VII on the orders of Napoleon Bonaparte. Munro Price looks at what happened next.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/bonaparte-meets-his-match
'She lived in a damp basement with her mother and sister, smoking roll-ups and talking to her parrot.'
Joanna Kavenna traces the life of the 'almost-forgotten poet' Charlotte Mew.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/she-hated-poetry-readings
'If, as James Wolcott once claimed, Roth was a miracle of modern medicine, he was also one of therapy’s notable failures.'
@leorobsonwriter on Philip Roth, that 'walking, wanking paradox'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-great-american-novelist