Worth Revisiting: Joan Cannon's Review of Islandia, a Novel of Remarkable Length Nowadays

ISLANDIA

Published by Farrar & Rhinehart; Hardcover, 1013 pp

This lengthy story covers a short time in the life of a privileged young man who forms a friendship at Harvard with another student from Islandia in 1905. John Lang of New England and Dorn of Islandia cement a friendship reminiscent of the male bonding of classics. After spending a summer together on Cape Cod, Lang has learned enough Islandian from Dorn and by studying on his own to secure a job as consul to the nation that occupies the southern coast of a continent whose nearest land mass would be Antarctica — if it existed. Endpapers in the original edition enable the reader to be oriented.

What Lang discovers in the idealized agrarian, humanist society alters him profoundly. So does his passionate love for a woman who, in the time period of the novel, would have been extraordinary, if only slightly less so today. He is befriended without prejudice by some very interesting characters of both sexes and all ages as he travels through the country he is charged with influencing in favor of foreign trade.

He narrates not only his adventures and minute observations of customs and landscape, flora and fauna, but his reactions to all of them. At once he reveals himself as an introverted, intelligent, compassionate, incredibly observant young man who might better have found himself at Brook Farm than Harvard, it seems. Thoreau's ghost is a faint, benign presence through discussions of the desirability of "simplicity" in social structures.

Sections read like poetic romance, others like adventure, some like fantasy of the best and most convincing kind, some like philosophy. The pace varies much in the way one's daily experience might in a place where the only means of transport are one's own legs, horses, or boats without motors. The reader is fully immersed in a complete new life in a very few pages, and by the last of over a thousand, has been in some way imprinted.

Worth Revisiting: Joan Cannon's Review of Islandia, a Novel of Remarkable Length Nowadays

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