I saw this book and liked the title, because I have been there, and the cover looked interesting. It showed promise of things marine, maybe mermaids. But, what a strange reading experience this was. Once I got into it and worked out what I thought was 'going on' I read it as one sort of story to find that most other people (reviewers) have taken the narrative, as it were, at face value.
On a remote island in Orkney, a curiously matched couple arrive on their honeymoon. He is an eminent literature professor; she was his pale, enigmatic star pupil as much as forty years his junior.
Alone beneath the shifting skies of this untethered landscape, the professor realises how little he knows about his new bride and yet, as the days go by and his mind turns obsessively upon the creature who has so beguiled him, she seems to slip ever further from his yearning grasp. Where does she come from? Why did she ask him to bring her north? What is it that constantly draws her to the sea?
Here I thought was a novel about the professor's imagination, his fantasy, his delusion. There he was in the rented cottage and everything that transpired was a dream born of an infatuation he had developed for his student.
I quite expected this to be revealed to the reader, in some very subtle way but unless I am rather dense, the ending resolved with the disappearance of the young woman, with no hint of explanation as to where, how, why. The ending was very unsatisfactory indeed.
What I could commend the book for is a narrative frequently interwoven with evocative descriptions of the maritime beauty of the setting for the novel, the ever-changing faces of the beach, the shore, above all the sea. That is a milieu in which I have spent many many hours pursuing my passion for conchology. Sackville has received appreciative review of her lyrical use of language but as a novel I could neither believe in it as a fantasy, nor as a poetic and enigmatic account of a honeymoon on a remote island.
Published reviews:
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/review-orkney-by-amy-sackville-8498004.html
https://www.scottishreviewofbooks.org/2013/01/oxygen-by-amy-sackville/
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