The Brides of Rollrock Island by Margo Lanagan

Previously published in Dawn Books & Authors. 

TheislandofRollrockhas a possibly North Sea setting, resembling perhaps the Scottish islands of Orkney, where the selkie myth probably originated. On Rollrock lives a young woman called Misskaella who, for all her insecurities about her looks and lack of suitors, is in possession of some strange powers. There’s something different about Misskaella, and it isn’t long before she begins to be recognized as that classic archetype of a powerful woman whom no man can understand or control: a witch. Of course, in a fantasy novel, it is the natural course of things that Misskaella finds herself able to control forces that should remain alien to her. She can draw a girl out of a seal, making her ‘form pale at the centre like an almond in its fruit, and the seal-ness [shrinking] outward to become fruit-flesh, to become coat’.

In her vengeance against the island’s young men, Misskaella tempts them with a selkie girl, letting them all see and desire her beauty, only to send her away again. Very soon, each man on the island ‘buys’ a bride from Misskaella, an innocent girl cleaved from inside a seal, hiding away the sealskin to ensure that the sea brides are trapped on land, in their new lives. The sea brides have no agency of their own, and there is a constant sense of regret and shame, an uncomfortable feeling of guilt that hangs over the men of this tiny island community (one man hides his away from his family in small cupboard in the shed, like a dirty picture or a smutty, strange addiction), even after their human wives and children leave, even after years of acquiring a sea bride from the witch becomes the norm. After all, in a good story, the idea of being able to live out a fantasy is only interesting if this comes at a price – more than the loss of their human wives and daughters, the men are acutely aware of their entrapment of these creatures, who are so clearly identified as innocent and passive that the entire scenario is uncomfortably like abuse, or even sexual slavery. ‘She’s like a doll…she just lets you’, observes one character on seeing the very first selkie transformed by Misskaella. ‘Oh they’ll go where they’re pushed, these women, if there’s no prospect of escape to animate them towards the sea’, clarifies another, ‘no wonder the menfolk like them’. The levels of which this idea is disturbing (even leaving feminist implications aside!) is what immediately locks a reader into the narrative.

This selkie story, as fantastical as it may be in and of itself, is of course far more than just fantasy – it’s a close, sensitive and very adult look at the relationship between these particular men and their women; this strange community that may have been practicing this method of entrapment even generations ago. Lanagan paces her story beautifully, carefully maintaining an alignment with a number of characters – none of whom are selkie, placing the reader in the extremely uncomfortable position of aligned with everyone who is part of this entrapment or stands by and watches it, but never with the ones who have been trapped. There is never a clear indication of the selkies perspective: they seem to function reasonably well on the island, they feed their children, they take care of their husbands, they run their homes. But they do not belong on land, and eventually lie quietly under their seaweed blankets, languishing for their former lives, unable to find their sealskins and return to their true nature. While the husbands ignore the misery of their sea brides, it is eventually the young half-selkie sons who force a change in the community.

To add to the strangeness of this new community of men, selkies and their sons on Rollrock, is the stark lack of female children. Why are there no living daughters? There is some talk of girls being born but what is done with or to them? This particular plot device is haunting but woven in surely, subtly. The reveal is astounding, and bears with it the additional weight of a string of uncomfortable ideas. Lanagan’s story is wonderfully unpredictable – never letting the reader become complacent, never letting the prose be any less than pitch-perfect. Regardless of who the narrator is, the language is always heavy with mood – perfectly atmospheric for such a storm-tossed setting.

Based on Lanagan’s 2010 World Fantasy Award winning novellaSea Hearts, Brides is not a book for those unwilling to access the deeper, darker, dirtier corners of their minds – Lanagan is known for her unsettling, often dark fantasy. Similar in premise at times to the work of English magic realist/feminist/surrealist writer Angela Carter, Lanagan has been a quiet star in her native Australia for many years, albeit never in the mainstream. She isn’t as widely as mainstream ‘literary’ Australian writers like Peter Carey are and the more’s the pity. Brides, at certain levels, is even more disturbing than Lanagan’s last novel, Tender Morsels, which created an uproar amongst YA writers the world over when it was suddenly removed from a list of 100 Young Adult Books for the Feminist Reader, as created by Bitch Media, a large, nonprofit organisation known and respected for encouraging ‘feminist response to mainstream media and popular culture’. The book, a wildly imaginative, devastating take on the Brothers Grimm fairy tale Snow White, Rose Red, was removed after complaints that the book did not critique the idea of rape as vengeance. Many YA writers asked to be removed from this list alongside Lanagan, in complete disagreement to the need for YA fiction to take the moral high ground. Lanagan explained her position clearly, saying ‘there is a lot of pressure from anxious adult carers of children and young adults to fill children’s and YA literature with explicit moral messages that can only be read one way, the ‘right’ way. This is not, I believe, the purpose of books and reading. Fiction is a means to make parts of the world visible in all its complexity and ambiguity, not cover up its nasty bits and hope they’ll go away. Fiction (particularly fantasy fiction) provides a safe place where uncertainties can be considered and explored.’ True to her belief, The Brides of Rollrock Island too, ensures that readers will be made to think about a great many uncertainties, even long after they have finished the book.