Island of Whispers

This seems to me to be something of a departure for Frances Hardinge, at least in its presentation. It’s a relatively short book in large format, and Emily Gravett’s illustrations pull an almost equal weight in telling the story. Hardinge’s prodigious imagination is harnessed and put in the service of a mysterious reverberating folk-like tale of life and death, story and memory, greed and grief, that shudders and shimmers in and out of shadows and light, like a boat at night. Milo is the son of the ferryman whose task is to carry the ghosts of the newly dead to the island of the Broken Tower. This is not an easy task and is governed by rituals as unquestionable as death itself: the collection of the shoes of the dead and the hooding of the ferryman’s ghostly passengers (for to look on the face of death is itself fatal). Milo is the younger son who is not expected to inherit this onerous responsibility, but on this dreadful night, a series of events, which include his father’s death, force it upon him. The events are driven by the actions of the local lord, the ghost of whose fourteen-year-old daughter (the same age as Milo) is aboard the ferry, and who her grieving father is determined to bring back to life, even if it can be done only by magic. Milo sets sail but is pursued by the lord, with two magicians in his service, determined to wrest his daughter from Milo’s care. The theme, and Hardinge’s treatment of it, is deep, dark, strange, and ultimately hopeful. It seems as if it might be rooted in some real ancient beliefs and ceremonies about the passage from life to death, but which have undergone their own strange alterations over time. In the hands of another illustrator, (why do I think of the late Charles Keeping?) this could have been, for most of its telling, quite disturbing. Emily Gravett, however, takes a cool, objective approach, introducing an equal amount of white space into her pictures from the very start, even for the action which takes place at night, and her depiction of the lord and his magicians mixes up historical and cultural references to a degree that reassuringly emphasises the fictional nature of the tale. Even the magician’s headless birds with their monkey claws are made to look like ingenious creations rather than diabolical grotesques. It’s a brilliant tale, which deals profoundly and movingly with mortality and, like the folk tales that are its origin and model, will fascinate, excite, and finally comfort its young readers.