Book Review: The Island by Armin Greder

The Island isn’t like most picture books you'll come across. There's nothing even remotely cute or fluffy about it. In fact, it is the kind of book that will leave readers, both adults and children, with chills. So do you want to expose your children to this? My answer is an emphatic yes. This is an important book, and no less important for being pitched at young children as well as adults. The way it reveals the prejudice inherent in humanity is superb.

For most children it will read as a kind of anti-fairy tale. An outsider arrives on the island — no tropical paradise — by raft. Although the islanders fear the outsider and want to send him back into the ocean, the fisherman, who isn't quite as xenophobic as the others, convinces them that they have a responsibility to save him from death by taking him in. What follows is a slow progression from fear towards hatred and finally crime, ending the story in a way that is salutary and unhappy. Children, aware that almost all of the books and films they watch do have a happy ending, will notice!

But as a parent, it's not hard to turn the sadness into an ending which is much more positive than it appears. I told my daughter that it was actually a happy ending because the story isn't real (though it's all too real), and we don't have to let it become real - we can learn the idea of difference and to accept and help others in need without being afraid.

There are many aspects of The Island which make it wonderful. First, it never preaches or tries to tell us what is and isn’t right. The moral is implicit in the plot, the characterisation, and the beautifully understated narration:

They took him to the uninhabited part of the island, to a goat pen that had been empty for a long time. They made him understand that he was to stay there and showed him where he could sleep on some straw.

And then they locked the gate and went back to their business, and life on the island returned to what it had always been. (9)

The images of what “it had always been” include drunken camaraderie and bullying. The images throughout the book are also exceptional. Simple charcoal and ink drawings with hints of teal and red convey dramatic character in the heavy, angry villagers, and the slim, fearful outsider. The two expansive ocean shots fill the double pages and also convey the ocean of fear and hatred that surrounds the island.

Article Author: Maggie Ball

Magdalena Ball runs The Compulsive Reader. She is the author of the novels Black Cow and Sleep Before Evening, the poetry books Repulsion Thrust and Quark Soup, a nonfiction book The Art of Assessment, and, in collaboration with Carolyn Howard-Johnson, …

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