Review: Vivien Horler

Wild Dark Shore, by Charlotte McConaghy (Canongate)

I have a weakness for storm-tossed islands. I have been to Tristan da Cunha, to South Georgia and the Falklands and am fascinated by the people who choose to make their lives in these farflung, remote places where nothing is sure.

Wild Dark Shore is set on the fictional island of Shearwater, but is based on Macquarie Island, a sub-Antarctic Australian island halfway between Tasmania and Antartica.

In a note on the setting, bestselling author Charlotte McConaghy describes Macquarie as 34km long and 5km wide, and a World Heritage Site home to more than four million seals, penguins and seabirds.

It has a research station where, at any one time, between 20 and 40 researchers work.

But that’s just part of the inspiration. The fictional island has a seed vault containing many thousand species of seeds intended to save them for humanity in the event of a cataclysm.

And rising seas mean a cataclysm is coming. The scientists have already departed, leaving an unusual family behind who live in the island’s defunct lighthouse. Well, all except the teenage daughter Fen, who prefers to spend her time in a boathouse down by the shore, among the elephant seals and fur seals and penguins.

The other members of the family are the father, Dominic, the older brother Raff, and the younger brother Orly, who is just 11.

A boat is coming in a matter of weeks to take the family home to Australia, along with many of the seeds they have been packing up for rescue.

One night, in a storm, the daughter Fen sees something bobbing in the sea, and manages to pull it in. She braces herself, fearing she will find something life-altering. It is a chunk of driftwood, snarled up with kelp, and among it all is a face – a face not swollen or blue or nibbled, but breathing.

Dominic and Raff race down to the shore and haul what turns out to be an unconscious woman up to the lighthouse. She has bad scrape injuries down one side, but Dominic is more worried about hypothermia, as the woman’s pulse and breathing are slow.

Once she is warm, Dominic stitches her wounds – these remote island dwellers are resourceful – but now she develops a fever. Dominic thinks to himself that inside, the sea is still fighting for her. “I think, deep in the darkest hours, that even if she survives this night, the ocean will have her back one day.”

But the woman, who is called Rowan, survives. We discover she was on her way to the island in a chartered boat ,but it foundered in the storm along with its single crew.

It emerges she has strong links with the chief scientist, and Rowan came because she had been getting some strange emails from him, apparently believing his life was in danger.

We know something has happened, because Dominic has gone to one of the field huts to clean up blood. The children are also warned to keep quiet. Dominic is suspicious of Rowan, as is she of him. But young motherless Orly wins her heart, because he is so pleased and excited to have her with them.

Slowly the mutual suspicion thaws, but everyone is still on edge, since they are meant to be packing up essential seeds based on the chief scientist’s list, and the tunnel leading to the underground seedbank is beginning to flood. And someone – it is not clear who – has smashed up the radio equipment so Dominic cannot not summon help for Rowan or even tell anyone of their parlous state.

And I can’t say more than that without ruining the story. This is a marvellous book, beautifully written, and told in the various voices of those on the island. Each member of the family interacts with Rowan in their own way, and somehow Rowan manages to be a catalyst in bringing widowed Dominic and his children closer.

Meanwhile the storms rage, and we explore themes of conservation and wild natural beauty, as well as family ties. And then there’s the cracking good thriller about what happened to the lead scientist, and the terrifyingly suspenseful end.

Charlotte McConaghy is the author of the acclaimed Once There Were Wolves, which I haven’t read, but certainly will now.