The Book of Iona Edited by Robert Crawford, Polygon, £15
When Samuel Johnson visited Iona he launched into a grandiose meditation on how travel was good for the soul. “To abstract the mind from all local emotion would be impossible, if it were endeavoured, and would be foolish, if it were possible,” he reflected. Far better to submit to your destination’s charms and revel in its history: “Whatever makes the past, the distant, or the future predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of thinking beings.” In one of his most famous lines, Johnson declared that “[the] man is little to be envied, whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona”.
Johnson’s friend, James Boswell, expressed similar sentiments when confronted by the island’s ruined sacred architecture. He wrote that it “warmed my soul with religious resolutions. I felt a kind of exultation in thinking that the solemn scenes of piety ever remain the same, though the cares and follies of life may prevent us from visiting them.”
As Robert Crawford’s wonderful anthology reveals, many people have been drawn to this tiny island (just three miles long and a mile and a half wide) because of its astonishing religious legacy. Painters adore the place, too, for its landscape and light, described by Crawford with poetic sensibility: “Emerald, turquoise and viridian tides passing over sunlit sand.” Above all, though, Crawford cherishes Iona for the promise it holds out of “a haunting encounter with long-gone individuals” and suggests that “almost no one can catch sight of, let alone set foot on, the island without a stirring of the imagination”.
The dozens of contributions to this volume would seem to prove his point. Alongside many extracts from luminaries of the past, Crawford includes commissioned pieces by contemporary writers. These orbit around the themes of remoteness and connectedness, which makes sense in the context of Iona.
To reach the island, various ferry journeys are required. As a character in one of the short stories jokes: “It would be quicker to get to Africa.” A sense of voluntary exile is required. Despite the isolation, though, Iona has always forged links with the outside world. Medieval monks reached out to the whole of Christendom through their writings and, these days, a location that means so much to so many people can hardly be thought of as disconnected. A character in another of the stories watches how “the summer ferries disgorged their regular loads: sightseers, pilgrims, heritage poppers, mystics, peace lovers.”
Other themes resonate through the stories: death and change, the creation of space in which to think, and a sense that Iona might be a place where relationships are free to blossom or fall apart.
One of the most accomplished pieces, by Ruth Thomas, gives us the child’s eye view. During a family holiday, full of arguments and guest houses that “smelt of pine wardrobes and Airwick air freshener and old casserole”, the young protagonist takes a stroll. “What was it about islands, she wondered, that made people want to build little chapels on them? What was it that made them think about God?” It’s an excellent question and Iona has been well described as a “thin place” where “this world and a world beyond seem to intersect”.
Fittingly, then, the anthology is peppered with Crawford’s translations from the Latin life of Columba by Adomnán, the 6th-century saint who will always be most associated with the island. The translations are daring in their freedom, but truly beautiful, and as worthwhile as any other poems in the book – and these include pieces by names as mighty as Wordsworth, MacCaig and Heaney.
Scattered through the volume, the nuggets of Adomnán also lift one’s spirits after encountering some of the grumpier remarks made by English visitors through the years. Keats found the western coast of Scotland a “strange place” and, in a letter to a friend, complained of the indolence it induced. His local guide was, he said, “an ignorant little man but reckoned very clever … he stops at one glass of whisky unless you press another, and at the second unless you press a third.”
As for Samuel Johnson, he may have adored the scenery but he had some grotty things to say about Iona’s residents. He reckoned them “remarkably gross, and remarkably neglected”, and lamented that “the island which was once the metropolis of learning and piety has now no school for education, nor temple for worship, only two inhabitants that can speak English and not one that can write or read.”
It was comments such as these that caused appropriate offence to Johnson’s Scottish readers, but Johnson speculated that “perhaps, in the revolutions of the world, Iona may be sometime again the instructress of the Western Regions”. Here, Johnson missed the point. Then, as always, Iona was busily instructing us all in the most mysterious, wonderful ways.
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