Invisible Islands is the first of Angus Peter Campbell’s books to be written in English rather than the Gaelic and it makes me hungry for more. I devoured this book in that way set aside for books that truly captivate – reading it fast because you’re so caught up in it, but at the same time trying to spin it out because the faster you read it, the sooner it’ll be over.
Invisible Islands has twenty-one chapters, each one set aside to an individual island of an imaginary archipelago off of the coast of Scotland. The islands are indisputably brother and sister to the Western Isles, the heart of the Gàidhealtachd, but each brushes against reality in slightly different ways. Campbell introduces us to islands, and their communities, each distinctly different, and paints rapid pictures that make them live in your head.
Campbell plays with language, with ideas, weaving the fantastic into the mundane, and the real into the imaginary. He pays an obvious homage to Italo Calvino, with Invisible Islands riffing beautifully off of Invisible Cities, but his work echoes that of not only Calvino, but also Borges, Marquez and Le Guin. In doing so, he creates a vibrant picture of modern Gaelic culture and life that reverberates outwards towards a wider Scotland, Europe and the world, with a voice raised in both celebration and anger.
Within the pages you will find islands where the inhabitants only ever walk clockwise; to islands where huge windfarms dominate; to one where the ghosts of the past blend with the electromagnetic voices of the present; to ones where language becomes a living palpable thing.
Each story is a perfectly composed fable, and the cumulative effect left me humming contentedly to myself. ( )