Surrounded by sea and sky: the irresistible draw of islands

Holiday islands, desert islands, love islands, islands of eternal youth, siren islands, islands filled with screaming demons. Of all the earth’s topographic features, islands are the most elastic, the most adept at accommodating the wilder projections of our imagination. Why it should be so is a question that has exercised writers from D.H. Lawrence to Oscar Wilde, Annie Dillard to Adam Nicolson. The cultural geographer John Gillis identifies it as a curiously western trait, an extension of the metaphysical thirst for definition, the need to cut everything up into discrete entities in order to understand it.

Island Dreams is Gavin Francis’s own contribution to the debate, based on his decades-long attraction to islands. As a doctor, his adult life has been a sustained oscillation between the intensely social world of clinical work and the outposts of some of the world’s remotest places: Athos, Iona, Barra, the Andaman Islands, Greenland, Patagonia, Norway’s Lotofen Islands, Lamu off the Kenyan coast, even an island on high-up Lake Titicaca. The places he cites read like a lockdown litany of longed-for destinations, an islophile’s bucket-list.

In many cases, Francis not only visited the islands but worked on them. He has conducted surgeries on Skye and Raasay, spent over a year as resident doctor at the Halley Research Station in Antarctica (chronicled in his excellent Empire Antarctica), worked as a warden on the Isle of May in the outer Firth of Forth, and learnt to be a parent on the Orcadian island of Hoy. In between these adventures, he has been based in Edinburgh — completing his medical training, donning a blue gown as a neurosurgeon, and dealing with patients as a family GP.