2025/070: Hy Brasil — Margaret Elphinstone

[tamaranth]

2025/070: Hy Brasil — Margaret Elphinstone

Sometimes I seem to recognise things, as if I’d dreamed it all already. Like ... this road through the orchards. The apple trees. Meeting you like I just did. The way the sun makes patterns on the gravel.I keep having the feeling that it isn’t new. People say autumn is melancholy, but I find it’s the spring that feels so old. [p. 153]

Hy Brasil is a group of volcanic islands in the mid-Atlantic: a former British colony, a former NATO base, a former pirate kingdom. It's hard to find due to magnetic and meteorological anomalies, and for centuries its actual position was a matter of debate. Travel writer Sidony Redruth (whose career is founded on the lie of her prize-winning article about Ascension and St Helena, researched solely in her local library) is commissioned to write a book about the islands. Hy Brasil incorporates her working notes for Undiscovered Islands, along with the narratives of some of the islanders: Lucy Morgan, in love with a dead man, rattling around in ancient Ravnscar Castle; Colombo MacAdam, a reporter for the Hesperides Times; and Jared Honeyman, who's trying to fund a dive to raise the Cortes, a 17th-century Spanish galleon, from where it sank near the small Ile de l'Espoir. 

Hy Brasil is geologically, politically and economically unstable. There seems to be plenty of money for new swimming pools and the Pele Centre volcanic observatory, but for some reason President James Hook (one of the four men who sparked the Revolution and won Hy Brasil's independence from the UK) is oddly reluctant to approve a grant for Jared's research. Could his history with Jared's father, another revolutionary, be the reason? Or is there something about the Ile de l'Espoir -- commonly known as Despair -- that he'd prefer remained secret?

There are echoes of other islands: references to The Tempest ('Caliban's Fast Food Diner', Mount Prosper), to Odysseus (Hook's wife waited ten years for his return, weaving) and to Tennyson's Ulysses, to Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe. There are references to St Brendan, to Vikings, to the Matter of Britain (those treasures in the Metropolitan Museum in New York: a chalice, a spear, a cauldron...) Yet Hy Brasil is also a part of the modern world -- well, the world of the late 1990s, which feels astonishingly remote now: no internet, no mobile phones.

The novel was first published in 2002 and I think I read it fairly soon after that, certainly before 2005. Very little felt familiar, except the mythic element of the treasures: I'd completely forgotten that it is also a story about political corruption, a thriller, and a romance. This time around, I found it as delightful as it is in my vague distant memory: and I think I appreciate Elphinstone's prose, and her characterisation, more than I did when I first read it.

Comments

[sovay]

Yet Hy Brasil is also a part of the modern world -- well, the world of the late 1990s, which feels astonishingly remote now: no internet, no mobile phones.

Thanks for the heads-up on this novel: I try to track modern Ruritanias (Orsinia, Hav) and this is not one I had encountered.