Hy Brasil
Hy Brasil, published by , is one of three of Margaret Elphinstone's novels which feature islands, reflecting her fascination with the subject.The Unknown Island, an essay by Margaret Elphinstone, is published in Isolated Islands in Medieval Nature, Culture and Mind edited by Torstein Jorgensen and Gerhard Jaritz and published by Central European University Press, Budapest, 2011. ISBN 978-615-5053-24-5
In Waylaid by Islands, published in the November 2007 edition of The Bottle Imp she recounts her enthusiasm for islands real and imagined.
Hy Brasil publication Details
Published by Canongate May 2002
This book has been published in Canada
(Toronto: McArthur and Co. 2002, 2nd ed. 2003) 448 pp.
Translated into German by Marion Balkenhol as Inselnotizen
(Germany: Econ/List Verlag 2004)
Translated into Portuguese by Maria Teresa Costa Pinto Periara
(Lisbon:Lyon, 2005)
An extract from this novel was published in Susan Bassnett and Stephanos Stephanides (eds.) Beyond the Floating Islands
Bologna: COTEPRA Reader Series 2002) pp77-79.
View a map of Hy Brasil
Synopsis
Sidony Redruth is a young English woman who, after fraudulently winning a writing competition, is sent by her editor to write the first-ever travel book on Hy Brasil, a near mythical island somewhere in the Atlantic whose very existence has been a matter of debate as late as the nineteenth century.Elphinstone's plot takes the island location as its starting point, throws in some old-fashioned priracy, a lost treasure, modern-day drug smuggling, political intrigue, an active volcano and a tragic love affair. Told through Sidony's notes for her book, Hy Brasil is a compelling and magical adventure story.
Reviews
Read the latest review on AmazonExtracts from other reviews of Hy Brasil
The Independent, Boyd Tonkin. 6/7/2002
'So many distinguished island stories throng the Canon that you might think no more literary landfalls would be required. But a bold, original novel can always redefine the borders of its genre, and Margaret Elphinstone’s Hy Brasil does exactly that. This is a holiday treat of rare distinction: ingenious, gripping, thoughtful, and wonderfully entertaining Into the bargain.
In the great Utopian tradition, Elphinstone creates a fictitious island-state in order to set in train an adventure yarn that can also function as a sort of thought-experiment. Her imaginary territory of Hy Brasil, formerly British Frisland, sits in the North Atlantic not quite halfway between County Kerry and Newfoundland. Mysteriously prosperous despite the fisheries crisis and the winding-down of a NATO base, the independent island and its odd people come under the scrutiny of a young Cornish travel writer, Sidony Redruth. Sidony has faked the competition entry that won her this guide-book commission: a clue to the subtle games with truth and illusion that Elphinstone plays. Arriving on this strange shore feels, according to Sidony, “like walking into a book, or into a dream”.
Yet the glittering maritime landscape, and its eccentric folk, come to life with enormous freshness and immediacy. On Hy Brasil, a piratical Celtic heritage fuses with Viking, Portuguese and African strands left from a thousand years of landings. Whisky Galore blends into The Shipping News, with a touch of Márquez in the mix. It’s sometimes silly, but immensely seductive. Behind a tearaway plot that features Spanish treasure, cocaine smuggling, political shenanigans, nervous romance and even volcanic eruptions, Elphinstone draws cleverly on a rich stock of insular allusions, from The Odyssey and The Tempest to Gulliver’s Travels.
“More’s been written about things that don’t exist than things that do,” warns Sidony’s local lover; Jed. Hy Brasil proves, in the manner of the strongest island narratives, that the places that don’t exist can make us think about the rules that apply, or ought to apply, in the places that do. The flamboyant escapism of this entrancing novel shows us a route back home. Whichever island you have in your sights this summer, I’d recommend you find a berth for it.'
The Scotsman, John Burnside. 6/7/2002
The island in Margaret Elphinstone’s Hy Brasil is also “full of voices”. It’s a mysterious place where the remnants of an imperial heyday, characters from “a black-and-white film” with language reminiscent of Elizabethan England, dwell alongside pirates, modern-day drug smugglers and refugees from other works of the imagination, from Moby Dick to The Tempest.
At the centre of this island sits a murmuring volcano, as dark and malevolent a presence as Shakespeare’s Sycorax and Hy Brasil’s political intrigues are as treacherous as any endured by the betrayed Duke. Elphinstone’s down-at-heel echo of Prospero’s realm is served up with characteristic warmth and wit: shipwrecked on Hy Brasil by her own dishonesty, Sidony Redruth, a novice travel-writer, takes shelter in “Caliban’s Fast Food Diner”; nearby, Trink’s Garage advertises its services using pictures “of a blonde with improbably large breasts, and a tear-off calendar impaled on one of her stiletto heels”.
We soon learn that Sidony is here under false pretences. Despite having won a national travel-writing competition with a piece the judges praised for “her willingness to go somewhere unusual and look at it differently”, Sidony has never been any further from home than Venice - a city she visited with her winnings from the competition.
Now, at the urging of her commissioning editor, she has taken herself as far afield as it is possible to be and, marooned on Hy Brasil, an island which, for much of its history has been literally “off the map”, she begins work on her first book: Undiscovered Islands (working title). However, when we find her, she is stuck: the eye for authentic experience which she displayed in her competition piece (a description of Ascension Island she cobbled together at her local library) founders before the authenticity of Kidd’s Hotel - “a depressing building, peeling stucco on the outside, and red plush wallpaper and acres of threadbare carpet on the inside, on which vast pieces of mahogany furniture float like jetsam from a Victorian steamship becalmed forever in the doldrums”.
Around Sidony, a web of tales unfolds: the lonely spirit, Colombo MacAdam falls for two women, both of whom are “in love with a dead man”; Ishmael, whale-watch tour guide and Melville refugee, enters politics; brigands and drug-traffickers, the ghosts of Captain Hook and Sir Francis Drake, malevolent shadows.
At the novel’s close, Sidony Redruth, an island in her own right before she came to Hy Brasil, begins to understand the real difference between art (for which we can also read forgery, deception and the invention of history) and “authentic” experience: “I looked at it, and I thought, yes, I will, I’ll write it all, tomorrow or some day. That’s one part I can play, even if I haven’t any other. But then Jared said, as if he’d heard me, ‘To hell with history. At least we can leave it over the water.’ He took my hand and pulled me up the steep bit. He was laughing. ‘I’ll share my island with you, Sidony,’ he said. ‘If you want it I’ll share the whole damn lot. But from here on in it’s private. You can write down all the history you like. Only not here. Not now. This bit is for living, just for its own sake.’
Hy Brasil Stamp
Hy Brasil has its own stamp, originally issued by the magazine ‘Wildwood’ in October 2004.Colin Langevald was the stamp’s designer, and copies of the stamp are available free from Mark Valentine.
The stamp can also be viewed on the website of the Island of Pabay.
It was recently included in a philatelic quiz on an Italian forum, where it was described as ‘bellissima’ - Italian Forum