Sea Room: An Island Life in the Hebrides Paperback – August 14, 2007

This book is, as one reviewer accurately puts it, a "scattershot" account of one man and his deep, abiding love for the Shiants (pronounced "Shants"), the three barren islands he has inherited in the Outer Hebrides. The man is Adam Nicolson (Baron Adam Nicolson, mind you, though he never mentions the title here, in keeping with his ambivalence toward "ownership" of them, described quite thoroughly herein). This love and attachment to place and his experiences - sometimes quite harrowing - constitute the theme of the book in the first several chapters and the last.N.B. - The web page here, for some reason, puts the book's length erroneously at 256 pages. My copy and those of other reviewers with different editions who mention the length all seem to have the correct page number: 391.The middle of the book - especially compared with the poetic prose of the first chapters - is a bit weighted down for my tastes with geological, socio-economic and historical minutiae about these islands. It's all quite interesting at first. But, caveat lector, Nicholson does go on a bit. In fact, the middle of the book would serve quite well, I think, as the foundation for a doctoral dissertation.But let me get on with what I loved about the book. Nicolson is a highly reflective, poetic and yet dogged writer who writes with a lovely relish about the desolate, frequently perilous beauty of these islands. He describes - better than I can - his instincts in life and writing beautifully:"One of the reasons I loved the Shiants was that they were away from the world of definition.....I never think things through. I never have. I never envisage the end before I plunge into the beginning. I never clarify the whole. I bank on instinct, allowing my nose to sniff its way into the vacuum, trusting that somewhere or other, soon enough, out of the murk, something is bound to turn up."He goes on to quote some lines from poet Denise Levertov:"There's nothingThe dog disdains on his way,Nevertheless heKeeps moving, changingPace and approach butNot direction - every step an arrival."He also mentions Emily Dickinson and quotes Yeats and Shelley. These are the sections I truly loved. Other reviewers have tended to dwell on the last chapter and the question of whether Nicolson should "own" the islands. The question is very much a non-starter for me. He should.In his passage describing medieval solitaries, Nicolson writes:"All the solitaries of the past have lived with that intense inner sociability. Their minds are peopled with taunters, seducers, advisors, supervisors, friends and companions. It is one of the tests of being alone: a crowd from whom there is no hiding."It is the great wonder of the best parts of the book that the reflective Nicolson describes his own inner personae, but that also the reader meets actual people - fulfilling these same roles - whom Nicolson has encountered during his long enchantment with the Shiants.

Hardback book at reasonable price. The dust jacket had a nick on center front, looked like someone who originally opened book package used scissors, but other than that the book was in good shape.

Reminiscent of Heat-Moon's PrairyErth: A Deep Map Nicolson's work is also a map in depth of the Shiants; tiny islands off the coast of Skye, in the Hebrides that his father gave him. Nicolson, born in 1957, lives with his family in Sissinghurst Castle, and is the 5th Baron Carnock, although we are told he never uses the title. (Can I borrow it then please Adam?) His father author Nigel Nicolson who gave the islands to Adam, bought the islands when his mother, authoress, Vita Sackville-West found them listed for sale by author Comptom McKenzie!All this talent, Nicolson claims, descended from an early branch of marauding Hebridean pirates and shepherds. Indeed, the Shiants were actually owned by the Nicolson clan centuries before his father's gift but were lost to one of those perpetual clan wars and raids the featured in this glorious region's long history. Adam decide on conservation and archeology, not profit, eventually opening up the isles to scholarly research international archeology teams and camping Boy Scouts. He has the honour of preserving these wonderful, floating, tiny bits of man's history but later argues against his own `ownership' in context and principle.Early in his ownership, whilst visiting his mentor and tenant he meets a typical "Jock of the North', looming over the author he challenges;"Ar yew the man who says he owns the Shiants?'"Yes," I said, smiling charm, the English defence, "I am actually"."Will, yer a sackful o' shite".Adam commissions an appropriate boat, a sixteen-foot, clinker built replica of the ancient boats with a Viking heritage. Declaring her a beauty he hesitating asks the dour, neat Hebridean builder if he will be able to become a proper sailor of her."Aye, if you had another life" is his reply.But, in fact, he is a quick learner and studies his craft as closely as his windswept and near-barren islands, uses his `little ship' well, joins the shepherd's in their annual roundup and gets the local accolade of knowing "every inch, rock and pebble' of his glorious heritage.He notes that ladies never find the `house island' (Eilean an Tighe) a welcoming environment and later archeology reveals a valid reason for such feminine detection of vibes - a limpet pile in the byre that shows the famine years, even decades, of starvation and hardship when the residents were reduced to eating this, the island's most repellent resource.Adam has deeded his islands to his son in turn and they remain a glorious resource in trust for us all (...).

good read

Well written detail history and natural history of a Hebridean Island

Visited the Outer Hebrides a few years ago and was enraptured with its isolation, beauty and community. It's a stripping away of all the distractions to what is really important. Adam Nicolson certainly gets it ands captures the essence of it beautifully in his writing.

This is a magnificent book, beautifully written with many excellent illustrations, likely to be the definitive volume on the Shiant Islands for years to come. More, it provides the benchmark for what is required for a study of all Scotland's outlying islands; all previous studies will be found wanting after this exemplary model.The book consists of sixteen chapters fundamentally dealing with the geology, wildlife and archareology of three uninhabited islands lying five miles or so off the coast of Lewis. But this is no dry history. The back cloth is a dazzling concentration of towering basaltic cliffs, crowds of guillemots, razorbills, great skuas and 240,000 puffins; the violence and danger of the surrounding seas; the songs and verse which encapsulate former island life, accounts of attempted murder, witchcraft and catastrophe and the treasured place the Shiants still hold in the Hebridean mind. The stage is a microcosm of richness: Bronze Age gold, the memory of sea eagles, an 8th century hermit and his carved stone pillow, memories of cruel clearances soaked up by the landscape and tales passed down from generation to generation.This is not another 'happy-clappy' saga written by a romantic, weekend recluse but a powerful baring of the soul by a man who has earned the admiration and friendship of his fellow islanders intertwined with his love of the past and a deep understanding of the rocks from which these islands have been hewn. For the first time since he inherited the Shiants from his father twenty years ago, Adam Nicolson tells the full story of his own experiences there in a style no other writer of the Hebrides has ever attempted before or since.Overall SEA ROOM is a stimulating book and one I read pleasurably and admiringly from cover to cover, non-stop. For this well written, well researched and scholarly work, Adam Nicolson has placed all students of the Hebrides in his debt. It deserves to be read by all involved in the contemporary study of Scottish life.

This is an intriguing book. Not a five star epic travelogue...it gets a bit too dry and academic in places...but lovers of the Scottish west coast with its unique socio/economic, cultural and natural history will find themselves well and truly sated by this near 400 page tome.Adam Nicholson can count himself one of the luckiest people on the planet to have inherited the wild and savagely beautiful Shiant Islands.Fortunately AN is hardly blase about his wonderful gift and has obviously burnt the midnight oil delving deep in every aspect of Shiant life.What comes through is the sheer savage beauty of the islands. Wild in tooth and claw and the arena for some truly heartbreaking tales of love and loss.The islands are not a place where dreams and fortunes are made. Rather they are a place of harsh reality and stuggle.Death haunts the barren land and stormy seas surrounding the islands but in the midst of death,living breathing human beings have conspired to steal a living off the land and the sea.Of course eventually,like gnats living on a Elephant, islanders are shaken off and the Shiants return to their lonely granduer.It's a tribute to Adam Nicholson that he records the reality and doesn't water it down with roseate impressions.