After the slow motion collapse of her marriage Anne seeks refuge on the jagged island of Lanzarote, one of the Canary Islands off Africa.

Wounded, prickly - like the Drago tree of the title - Anne broods about her past, trying in her notebook to exorcize the ghosts of her husband and troubled sister.

She meets the novelist Richard who lives on the island seasonally, perched in his house as though at an outpost of progress, surrounded by artefacts made by the local potter Domingo. His plan to pluck bits of the islanders' story from Domingo to use in his next book becomes, in Isobel Blackthorn’s hands, a parallel for the robber cultures that plunder from others .

With Domingo and Richard, Anne explores Lanzarote, learning the unhappy story of its fragile population, the target of conquerors and pirates, and now of tourists. Anne both welcomes and distrusts Richard’s interest. He advances but exasperatingly retreats. Domingo just as infuriatingly holds his counsel. Unexpressed emotional forces heave beneath the surface, like the volcanic forces that shape the island. When they erupt it is in the form of their argument over tourism, whether it is the ruin of the island or its salvation.

Underlying the story of these three people is a meditation on the art of writing. Richard, seeing Anne’s notebook, thrusts upon her his views as a professional writer. As Anne tests his critiques, expanding her notes, trying for her own voice, Blackthorn weaves them also into her novel, playing with them, taking us alongside the writing process at the same time as we are reading its results - this book. It’s a risk to skim along just inside the “fourth wall’ like that but Blackthorn beautifully pulls it off. And when Anne confronts her ambiguous feelings about Richard, Blackthorn unexpectedly turns us further down the theme of exploitation, this time about where personal lives meet literature.

For readers who love layered levels of feeling and thought expressed in fine language, this is your novel. ( )

The Drago Tree, the name and the cover appealed from the start, and then from the first page, I was in love with the beautiful prose, the elegantly constructed sentences, which promised an intelligent and insightful story, sensitively told.

I was not disappointed.

The novel is set on the island of Lanzarote, brought to life by an author who knows it intimately. With confidence, she lavishes poetic descriptions of its unique landscape, placing you there; making you feel, see and fall in love with the place.

For example, the character Ann sees from her car window: “Several calderas pimpled the land to the south-west. The lava plain, to the south of her now, rose to meet its mother, La Corona, a monolith of black in the fading light.”

The author applies her talent for intricate detail to her characters as well. The trio we focus upon are complex, flawed, vulnerable…

It is Ann’s journey we follow, and I really enjoyed the snippets of her past that were revealed to us, providing intriguing, and at times, disturbing encounters with her sister.

The island’s past and history is also heavily featured; and I could not help but champion and understand Ann’s sympathy for an island ravished by tourists, its past and culture presented in superficial and sensational ways to serve as a diversion to the damage being done to natural habitats.

Through Ann we are able to connect with what is natural, meaningful and raw – she is despite her troubled and haunting past, an idealist, an artist – a cloud catcher!

I found it a delightful and enjoyable read… the believable relationships explored in the novel developed, expanded and evolved swiftly, adding sprinkles of romance and mystery to an inner journey taking place in an exotic location.

I recommend this novel if you like superb writing and reading a novel that has something meaningful to say about people, places and life.
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This sensitive, introspective story, recounted with exquisite prose, takes place on Lanzarote, in the Canary Islands. Author Isobel Blackthorn, who lived on Lanzarote for several years, has captured well the intense, raw beauty of this small volcanic idyll. The ravages the island has endured, leaving it exposed and raw in places, mirror the protagonist's inner journey throughout the novel.

“Ahead, the bare-sided calderas loomed. They’d reached the lava plain of Timanfaya, an underworld on the overworld, the earth’s subcutaneous layer smeared upon its skin…”

Ann, a hydrologist, has come to Lanzarote to escape for a few weeks, but even here, finds that there’s no escaping the trauma bubbling up inside. She begins to write, partly as a means to come to terms with the end of a difficult marriage and a troubled relationship with her sister. Together with author friend Richard and local potter, Domingo, she wanders the island’s small villages, beaches, and cliffs. Cuts into the past are frequent, painful reminisces which often feel like sheer drops from the cliffs of the island itself, jarring and dislodging the detritus carried within, as Ann tries to reconcile her past and chart a path for the future.

“Crusting over the top with cool thoughts and detached emotions was all very well, but underneath, rattling about in that hollowed chamber, lived memories of past torments, moiling vestiges like brooding bats, poised to scream in fits of frenzy in response to any slight.”

Sometimes prickly, like the drago tree itself, Ann is nevertheless unfailingly astute, using her scientist’s acumen to seek clarity where she can. The honesty of her shrewd observations on herself, on the people around her, and on life itself, set the Drago Tree apart from other stories of its ilk and left me with much to ponder. ( )

The Drago Tree by Isobel Blackthorn is an environmental romance. The love object is Lanzarote, the stunningly beautiful island that is the easternmost of the Canary Islands, its geography making it the target of conquest and invasion by pirates, Spanish conquistadors, and tourists. Yes, there are people involved, but the land dominates everyone and everything.

“She felt herself expand in the face of what she saw. Ever since her first geology field trip in the Lake District she had known there exists something profound and ineffable in the relationship between nature and the human beholder, a capacity to feel exhilarated by nature’s beauty, as if she could transcend her little life in the face of the earth’s grandeur.”

Ann is drawn to the land, to Lanzarote’s wild and stark volcanic landscape. It is land formed by volcanoes, by violent eruptions. She seeks refuge there after the explosive collapse of her marriage. In fact, she describes her life in geologic terms, it’s failure beginning as soon as they married. “Within weeks their interactions were tectonic, always grinding and crashing into each other, until their relationship had become a grotesque deformation.”

She meets Richard, a successful genre writer, not that she is terribly impressed by that since she is a bit of a literary snob. Sparks fly between Ann and Richard, a mix of attraction and antagonism. She’s feeling prickly and he’s far too shallow for her.

There is a third wheel on several of their excursions, a local potter named Diego. Richard picked him out to be his friend on the island and Diego goes along with him to a degree. Many of the conversations among the three of them concern the history of Lanzarote and the role of tourism in the present. Ann and Diego are decidedly anti-tourism while Richard sees it as a necessary element to the economic development and enrichment of the island.

Ann is quite disdainful of tourists and tourism. She’s irritated when they crowd the sites she goes to see. She loathes the flashes of their cameras in the caves and the hubbub of their conversation, their amusement at the tour guide’s humor and their very existence. Heritage should just be lived, not collected and examined. Of course, she’s a tourist, too. And when Richard points it out, she is livid. “His comment cut her like shrapnel. She despised him then, intensely.”

And if all tourists picked up a special stone at every site they visited, they would denude the beaches and cliffs and caves of small stones. For someone who examines so much of her life, there is a moral obtuseness here. She reminds me of those who think they stand apart, that they are travelers, not tourists.

It is not that she never interrogates herself. She sees herself as somewhat like the land of Lanzarote. “Crusting over the top with cool thoughts and detached emotions was all very well, but underneath, rattling about in that hollowed chamber, lived memories of past torments, moiling vestiges like brooding bats poised to scream in fits of frenzy in response to any slight.”

She recognizes that there is a similar avidity in scientists as in tourists in an interesting extended metaphor. This highlights one of the delights and exasperations of The Drago Tree. Isobel Blackthorn is in love with language and with crafting outstanding sentences, finding new and unique metaphors. There’s a precision and beauty to her prose that is undeniable. Sometimes, though, this is at the expense of the narrative. Blackthorn is more in love with writing than with telling a story.

“What about her? A scientist—didn’t she have the same wanderlust, the same yearning to discover? The scientist’s quest is indefatigable, a million wandering minstrels popping up everywhere, chanting hypotheses, strumming out experiments, singing gleefully their proofs and verifications, consummate lab-coat entertainers satisfying their inquisitive minds. Tell me more, I need, I must, I have to know the answer, the solution, the prevention, the cure. The whole earth is unearthed in this insatiable desire to know.

I enjoyed The Drago Tree. I liked the prose far more than the story. I think the writing mattered more than the story and that was her choice. It’s a bit of a confusing novel because Blackthorn is trying to accomplish too much. She’s writing a story of a woman finding herself, a story of family tragedy and struggle, a romance and an environmental manifesto. She is most successful with the last, because after all, this story really is a love affair with the land and history of Lanzarote. The rest is decoration.

Is humanity doomed by its own inquisitive and acquisitive drives? Is that what the myth of Atlantis is really about? Not a story of a fallen civilization long ago, but a warning, a foretelling of what is to come? Surely that is a doomsday mentality, yet maybe we are bound ”

Although this quote is pessimistic, the story does find hope, not just for Ann, but for Lanzarote as well.

I received an electronic copy of The Drago Tree from the publisher through NetGalley.

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