A Strange Choice of Prize Winner...

I don't often venture into literary criticism on this blog. However, the recent choice of The Island by Victoria Hislop (see below) as Waterstone's Newcomer of the Year in the Galaxy British Book Awards left me both surprised and depressed.



I took this book on holiday to Greece with me last year with high expectations. The book is set in Crete and tells the story of the tiny island of Spinalonga, a now-deserted former leper colony. It sounded an intriguing tale, and as a lover of Greece and its islands myself, the setting was an added bonus for me.

However, I found it one of the worst written books I had read for many a year. Ms Hislop's prose style is flat and dull, and the dialogue is especially leaden. Characters regularly deliver slab-like paragraphs of exposition in the least life-like manner imaginable. And the writing is often lazy. For example, near the start of the book the narrator and her parents go to a Greek restaurant and order the most predictable dishes you could pick: moussaka, stifado, kalamari, needless to say accompanied by a bottle of retsina. There was a golden opportunity here to bring the scene to life by describing some of the many more interesting and unusual Greek specialities, but instead - as throughout the book - the author was content to take the easy option.

What I found hardest to take about The Island, though, was the constant switching of viewpoints from one character to another. This is something every new fiction writer is taught to avoid, and for good reason - it confuses the reader and makes it almost impossible to identify and empathise with any of the characters. Almost every modern novel is written in scenes portrayed through the eyes (and other senses) of a single viewpoint character. If you are going to ignore this convention, as Ms Hislop has, you need to understand clearly what you are doing and why. I am not at all convinced that this was the case with The Island.

I do think that Victoria Hislop, a travel writer by profession, has uncovered a fascinating story here, and as social history it is certainly worth documenting. It is just a shame that she does not have the writing skills to turn it into a decent novel. What depresses me is that The Island was given this plaudit despite being poorly written - presumably because it was an interesting story, and the author and her husband are already well known in the literary world. Meanwhile, other much better written novels by authors with lower public profiles are shamefully ignored.

Anyway, excuse my rant. I have nothing against book awards, but I do think that above all else they should recognise and reward good writing. When a book such as The Island gets feted despite all its shortcomings, it seems to me unfair on the many 'unknown' authors who could have benefited hugely from the publicity generated by this award, not to mention the many readers (myself included) who may buy this book on the back of all the hype and feel short-changed by it.