SEA ROOM

A lovely biography of a place: the Shiants, in the Hebrides, are an island threesome of grass, wind, and birds that have had a long human presence and are sometimes the home of travel and environmental writer Nicolson.

When Nicolson was 21, his father gave him the Shiants, which he had purchased years before. The fact of ownership doesn’t sit comfortably with the author—though he may lay claim to descent from the chiefs of Lewis—but he won’t part with the islands, for his love of them is keen and deep. Nor will he fence them off, choosing rather to make them available to those drawn there. Matters of private property aside, this is his gift to the islands, a rangy exploration of their human past, a delineation of their prospect, an overview of their natural history. Nicolson has listened hard to the men who have experience with the Shiants, has become familiar with the campions and flag iris, the puffins and shearwaters, and the seeps where fresh water is gathered. He has pondered the possible histories behind ruins on the islands—a Norse house? a hermit’s retreat?—and he is as hungry to know about the glories of a workaday boat he has made for the local waters, fit for the teeth of the breaking seas, as he is to hear any of the tales, tall or true, that speak of the islands’ past. His writing is clear—as sharp, informative, and exact as the explanation he gets from the shipwright—but it’s also sensitive to the hauntings and holiness of the islands: They’re “a place in which many times coexist, flowing at different speeds, enshrining different worlds.”

Nicolson’s love letter to the Shiants is a summing-up, rich with history and curiosity, that is itself now also a part of the place. And the Shiants are the better for it. (58 b&w illustrations, 4 maps)