Deserted Island List Mania: Top Shelf Deserted Island Yarns

     Deserted islands have always seized my imagination in a manner that enthralls and delights my whole being. It is something about the fantasy of such a place that sends my mind wheeling into a hazy dreamland of jade palm trees and sapphire ocean waves lining the beaches of desolate solitude. Their siren song beckons, especially within a culture such as ours where we are so constantly plugged in and purposed in all our actions. 
     To me, a deserted island would truly be an isolated respite from the myriad of responsibilities and pulls inherent in modern life. Sure, the island lifestyle and daily survival endeavors appear tricky and quite rooted in a multitude of dangers in all the following yarns, but it sure beats 40+ hours a week and the monthly bills that just keep slipping through the cracks. Deserted islands defy convention and the ordinary semblance of civility that clings to us like a second skin. The fantasy allows some to shed that skin and weave daydreams out of what life could be like far and away from anything we have ever known before.


1. Lord of the Flies by William Golding

     The gold standard of deserted island tales, William Golding's classic sure makes island life look a bit apocalyptic. A group of young, ordinary-enough English schoolboys becomes stranded and, at first, the fact that there is not an adult anywhere in sight makes this look like a fun adventure. But fun, rules, and the flimsy semblance of civility quickly erode as violence and panic rear their terrible heads. This is a chilling novel that makes a reader ask herself how fast her own hold on propriety and order might slip were she ever treading similar waters.








2. Robinson by Muriel Spark

    Part deserted island tale, part murder mystery, Muriel Spark's novel snares attention immediately with a frank and unsentimental heroine journaling her new life as a plane-wreck survivor. Through this lens, we are introduced to the isolated and mysterious Robinson Island where cats play ping pong, strange mists slink through the trees, hidden tunnels are plentiful, the occult might be real, blackmail is afoot, and ants have a habit of flying. Robinson is a captivatingly quick read that proves, once again, that Ms. Spark is the master of any genre, including the island castaway tale.





3. The Black Stallion film

     The first half of this film plays out like a dream as a young boy and a mysterious black horse are suddenly shipwrecked and marooned together in the middle of the ocean. On an uninhabited island the two slowly suss each other out and find that their survival depends on their cooperation. The quality of the rest of the movie is debatable, but the beginning island scenes are breathtaking and sumptuous in both sight and sound as the boy eventually sits astride a galloping stallion, leaving long, wild tracks in the starkly white sands hemmed in by an infinitesimal blue.






4. Foe by J. M. Coetzee

    This novel is at once a reinvention of the tale of Robinson Crusoe and also a reworking of the basics of story-telling itself. The island is always there as are Crusoe and his silent companion Friday. But there is also one more, a woman, and she proves to be more than a mere secondary character to the men in her world. A puzzling and enigmatic novel that takes a new view on the story the world thinks it knows so well, that forever alters that island and its infamous inhabitants into something much more treacherous, electric, and mesmerizing.




5. I Was Amelia Earhart by Jane Mendelsohn

     "Banking into a cover of clouds off the New Guinea coastline on July 2nd, 1937, Amelia Earhart vanished forever. That day she disappeared from an intensely public and infamous life within the silver body of her beloved Lockheed Electra aircraft. In writer Jane Mendelsohn's novel, the imagined life that came after that red letter day vibrates and sounds itself into an existence just as enticing as that which has been so renowned and retold. The words of this story flash forward and backward through Amelia's true and fictional history, from the greatest altitudes of flight to the depths of what an individual can endure and yet still remain herself. A novel of one famed and long lost heroine finally found." (My previous review.)










6. John Dollar by Marianne Wiggins 

     This novel has been called a "female Lord of the Flies" and serves to bookend this list well with the more infamous novel that gave way to such a description. John Dollar finds itself dripping in sumptuous detail among the colonial Burmese nation just after the finish of the first world war. There a newly widowed British schoolteacher meets the charming eponymous sailor who becomes her passionate lover. When a startling earthquake and subsequent tidal wave washes the two and eight young schoolgirls from their ship, they find their destinies inextricably linked on a small deserted island far from help or civilization. The shocking lengths that are taken for the sake of survival raise the hackles of readers and prove once again that the island life is no joke under any circumstances.