A Son of the Rock

Polygon, 2017, 176 p, plus i p Map of Robinson island, iv p Foreword by Alan Taylor and ix p Introduction by Candia McWilliam. First published 1958.

The novel is presented as the recollections of January Marlow, a passenger on an aeroplane which crashed on an island with only three survivors, herself, a man called Jimmie and another named Tom Wells. The island is the demesne of the mysterious and pernickety Robinson. (We note here a certain Crusoe, plus a Swiss family also marooned, not to mention the island of Prospero.) Robinson normally has few companions, a boy named Miguel – and a goat – though Jimmie had been on his way back to the island. Note too, that Wells’s surname evokes another island, that of H G of that ilk’s Doctor Moreau.

This all takes place at a time when communications were not as easy as they are now and the survivors worry about the effect their apparent disappearance will have on their lives back home. (They had in fact been declared dead.) The arrival of the annual pomegranate boat – that fruit is the island’s main produce – is awaited eagerly so that they can return to civilisation.

A small canvas such as this is of course a familiar staple of novelists even beyond the examples mentioned above and provides ample scope for interpersonal conflict. This is exacerbated when Robinson goes missing in suspicious circumstances halfway through the book and the rest suspect each other of killing him. Robinson’s mistrust of religion contrasts with January’s faith (and, of course, Spark’s.)

This was Spark’s second novel and has less opacity than many of her later works. This may be due to the use of a first-person narrator.

Pedant’s corner:- In the Introduction; Dr Benigno (in the text it’s Dr Benignus,) staunched (stanched.) Otherwise; a capital letter is used at the beginning of an unspoken thought expressed within a longer sentence. In those moments the typography therefore looks odd. “Anyway” beginning one sentence and, less than two lines later, “And anyway” begins another.