When Diana Souhami won a Whitbread award last year, booksellers and librarians who had been puzzling whether to classify Selkirk's Island as fact, fiction, faction, fable or fantasy must have been relieved. The judges gave the book the biography prize, so the eponymous mariner has at last ended up on the right shelf.
That pleases Souhami, too - to a degree. Not only is she a writer who makes a speciality of producing books that don't fit into an obvious niche, she's a bit hard to pin down herself. She'll happily talk about her roots - her family are Sephardic Jews - but she is coy about revealing her age.
Her book tells the life story of Alexander Selkirk, whose abandonment and four-year survival on the uninhabited island of Juan Fernandez was the basis for Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe . But in the course of her researches - reading ships' logs of the early 18th century, staying on the island for four months - another central character emerged: the island itself.
Several of Souhami's previous books have been about celebrated or notorious figures who had a hidden or secondary aspect to their lives. Among them are a book on Radclyffe Hall, author of the lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness , and an account of the friendship between Cecil Beaton and Greta Garbo, "a mannish woman and a womanly man", as one reviewer put it.
All these figures had a marginal side to their lives, but with Selkirk, the marginality was geographical: a Scot from the wilds of Fife, dumped alone in the wilds of the Pacific. It's a tale that has been often retold over the past three centuries, but is cleverly refreshed by Souhami.
She eschews the convention of chronology: "Biography doesn't have to be one thing after another." And as well as the usual documentary research, she decided to subject herself to a stint on the island: the idea of how she would fend for herself in an isolated spot had long appealed. "When I went out to the island, it changed the whole perspective [of the book]; as I looked closer there were just more and more ingredients for a story." The primal challenge of surviving in unknown terrain excited her - even though she had a commission from her publisher, a return ticket to Santiago, and plenty of Imodium capsules. The medication for diarrhoea was more useful than the mobile phone she'd brought, which didn't work on the island.
"It was much more primitive than I'd supposed. I'd heard that there was a Daniel Defoe hotel, but it was a crumbling log cabin; I'd heard that there were shops, but they were little huts that might have a tin of sardines. I'm quite reticent and shy, and don't speak Spanish, but people were nice to me when they realised I didn't want anything. I was just an eccentric English woman."
Souhami's interest in how Selkirk survived four years and four months alone on the island included how, as "a lusty, thuggish guy, all on his own", he managed without sex. The goat meat he cooked and the goat skins he wore led her to wonder if the animals were also a source of sexual gratification.
Her speculations were confirmed by an islander who told her, "You know, Selkirk used goats, and [it] still happens." Souhami remarks: "It didn't seem very terrible to me that he should be buggering the goats, but a lot of newspapers picked up on it." So did one of Selkirk's descendants, who plaintivelytold the Star : "There's no need for these sorts of accusations at all, and he's not even around to defend himself."
Souhami takes gleeful pleasure in mixing genres. She cites her debt to the "faultless scholarship" of the maritime historian Glyn Williams, but then adds: "He must hate my book. What he is not good at is having an opinion. I don't want to write that sort of book; I want to generalise; to bring in a bit of fiction." She stoutly defends this multi-genre approach: "I can play games in my own books, can't I? History isn't what happened. It's what people tell us happened, and what we make of it ourselves. Those journals that ships' captains kept were very circumspect about some things."
Souhami is pretty deft at pulling aside the curtain of circumspection, often revealing the hypocrisy behind it. Though she was born and educated in Britain, and worked for the BBC before becoming a full-time writer, she still feels like an outsider. Certainly she revels in an outsider's take on some of the weaknesses of the British. She gets riled by the double standards of sexual morality, and has written about some notable instances of it in history.
Researching the life of the royal mistress Mrs Kepple, she was fascinated to find that the royal paramour was fêted by high society while at the same time her daughter, who was having a "torrid affair" with Vita Sackville-West, was "maligned and traduced". Souhami is galled, too, by the establishment's treatment of Radclyffe Hall. "She wrote this utterly boring book, where the sexiest thing in it was 'and that night they were not divided'. She actually used the pronoun 'she'. Then there was the pomp of the trial. Her whole life was a trial."
Souhami's voice tapers off in weary disbelief. Even so, she has more than grudging respect for one of the main vices of the English: their expertise in using innuendo. "I love it," she exclaims. She is, of course, a first-rate decoder.
