It’s hard to think of many superficial affinities between Frank O’Hara, the queer poet and art critic whose urbane voice is synonymous with 60s Manhattan, and Alexander Selkirk, the 18th-century Scottish privateer whose marooning on a tiny island in the South Pacific would eventually inspire Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Yet, curiously, it is a line from O’Hara’s poem Mayakovsky that Francesca de Tores refits for Selkirk’s mouth at the opening of her new novel, Cast Away.
Selkirk insists that he is cast upon the island “only by the catastrophe of my personality” – “which is a sobering thing, even for a man used to being sober”. And while the O’Hara of Mayakovsky is famously content to wait “for the catastrophe of my personality / to seem beautiful again, / and interesting, and modern”, Selkirk – newly and utterly alone on “a stony blemish in the ocean”, 400 miles off the coast of Chile – spends his first three days and nights on the island blind drunk on the cask of flip left behind with him as a courtesy from his erstwhile crewmates, raging at his fate. This act of unexpected transhistorical ventriloquism is a suitably strange beginning to a surprisingly uncanny novel.
De Tores’s first historical novel, Saltblood, dramatised the remarkable story of Mary Read, the real-life genderqueer buccaneer of piracy’s so-called golden age. Intrepid and unabashedly romantic, the novel won the 2024 Wilbur Smith adventure writing prize. As a follow-up, Cast Away – despite the obvious congruences of setting and theme – is a more wistful prospect. It’s still a historical maritime epic, but stripped of the genre’s conventional ballast, entirely rooted in a single location and concerned far more with the internality of its protagonist than the externalities of salt-washed and sun-baked mise en scène.
In the novel’s opening pages, Selkirk, crawling out of his three-day bender on the Más a Tierra strand, realises he is faced with a choice between hardscrabble survival and total oblivion: “Here … if I die I am lost to all knowing. The rats will have my flesh and the wind will scour my unburied bones, and no record will ever hold my name nor tell the story of my passing. It would be a dying more complete than any other.”
If you’re wondering how any author could wring a novel of more than 300 pages out of such scanty components, the answer is soon clear: compelling characterisation. De Tores’s Selkirk is an adorably reprobate antihero whose company never palls as we follow him through his long days spent hunting and skinning goats, smoking, scavenging and – understandably – engaged in furious bouts of onanism.
“Here on this island, I who have nothing must be everything,” Selkirk declares: “I must be roper and chandler and tanner and carpenter all at once.” The scenes in which he scrapes hides and brews moonshine are so comprehensive and painstakingly well researched that they could almost be used as how-to guides – yet somehow they never become tedious. Steadily, a spiritual dimension creeps into Selkirk’s labours: day by day the island transforms from prison to purgatory for the “intemperate” Scot.
Marooned with a single Bible as his source of spiritual succour, Selkirk at first rummages scripture for glancing mentions of breasts with which to augment his tropical wank-a-thons (the Song of Solomon and Books of Ezekiel prove particularly fruitful). But soon his thoughts turn more reflective. He begins to splice the gospel up into stark erasure poems and submit to the barren beauty of the island, where the hummingbirds dart around his campfire like “strange and shimmering machines of air”, and a colony of migratory sea lions tumble on to the beaches every year as a “landslide of flesh”.
Stripped bare, Selkirk begins to judge himself “a strange creature, full of goat meat and metaphors”, and wonder how a man might go about finding his “better self”: “Any pleasure I might have is tarnished always by my wretchedness and misery; I am furious when I eat, and desolate even when I frig myself, and in every way I know for certain that this island has ruined me. And yet I live, and I do not know whether I account it a comfort that I shall not soon die.”
The novel’s rubric makes no secret of Selkirk’s literary significance as the inspiration behind Robinson Crusoe, and it is obvious enough to the reader that he will eventually be rescued. The narrative tension of Cast Away resides mainly in De Tores’s decision to withhold a full explanation of Selkirk’s marooning on Más a Tierra – “the crowning calamity of a life built of calamities” – until the novel’s conclusion. Piecemeal, we learn of Selkirk’s youthful involvement in the abortive New Darien venture, a disastrous plan to found a Scottish colony in modern-day Panama, and of his childhood in Scotland, beset by the bullying of six elder brothers on one side, and the “shameful affection” of a cloying mother on the other (“and all the while dreaming of the sea”).
Cast Away may begin as a straightforward nautical adventure story, but it concludes as a poignant, sophisticated portrait of a man far more modern and interesting – at least in De Tores’s telling – than the historical record might let on. A man journeying toward an “unchurched” revelation of himself.
• Cast Away by Francesca de Tores is published by Bloomsbury (£18.99). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
