- The Guardian,
- Saturday May 17 2008
The Island, by Armin Greder
(Allen & Unwin, £11.99)
Starkly illustrated in a sombre expressionist style brightened by a few pertinent flashes of colour, this brilliant and haunting picture book painfully captures the violent hatred that the most harmless of outsiders can engender.
The Island is the work of the Swiss illustrator Armin Greder and was first published five years ago in Germany. It tells the story of a stranger who is washed up, helpless, hapless and naked, on the shore of an island. Who is he? Where has he come from? What does he want? Ideally, the villagers would send him packing; they'd cast him out to sea to find his way back to wherever he came from. But the local fisherman who found him warns that it would lead to his certain death - and this is confirmed by a magnificent double-page spread of the surging sea in charcoal grey. Reluctantly, they decide to let him stay - locked up in an abandoned goat pen.
Gradually the islanders realise that the man needs food and help, but the very thought of it brings out their most deepseated prejudices. Everyone, including the teacher and the priest, finds an excuse not to help him. And so they don't.
All the usual concerns about immigration are lightly understated in the text and fleshed out with a cruel humour in the illustrations. He will eat all our food, cry the villagers. Then give him a job, suggests the good fisherman. "'If he was in my kitchen, nobody would want to eat at my inn,' muttered the inkeeper." This exchange takes place beneath a picture of the interloper paddling his grubby hands in the food while all around him is squalor. The text and pictures work against each other to both illustrate the villagers' fears and illuminate the viciousness of their prejudices.
There's no redemption here; no one good man who will break ranks and turn the minds of all the others. After their feeble efforts to accommodate him, the islanders reject the man absolutely, physically pushing him back into the sea. They also turn against the fisherman who found him. Cue a second double-page sea picture, almost identical to the first apart from the addition of a burning boat.
Greder's references to the European expressionist tradition - most obviously Munch's The Scream - give a timeless resonance to this tale of cross-cultural hostility. The people's hatred makes them savage, while their fear makes them so stupid that they build a fortress around their island. "They never again wanted to eat fish from this sea that had brought them the stranger."
