Towards a desert island

Press, 17 October 1987, Page 22

Towards a desert island

Runaway. By Lucy Irvine. Penguin, 1987. 348 pp. $1299 (paperback) (Reviewed by Ralf Unger) “Intelligent and attractive; full of potential,” was the description that 12-year-old Lucy Irvine was given by a child guidance clinic after she had run away from school on ■ numerous occasions. From a home tom by arguments, and with a sister who was anorexic, and was later to become an <. alcoholic, young Lucy = sought somebody she could trust and love and be loved by. Eventually she was to answer an advertisement to join a man on a desert island for a year, which became the subject of her first book “Castaway” making her name as an author. The present book describes her character and life before her desert island. People she clung to turned out to be misfits and selfish, rather than the gentle beings she had hoped; men used her sexually while she worshipped them, and even her deeply

loved father seemed mainly interested in her baking ability while she was employed at his hotel. Adventures in exotic lands were more frequently the reality of flea-infested hovels, and a. golden time in Greece became a nightmare of violent rape. This was a turning point in her shutting herself off emotionally from others and a numb despair developing ; into a psychiatric disorder.. > ‘ ? * ■ Years in English • psychiatric hospitals fitted her into an institutional mold, but always there was the beating of wings to soar once more. Eventually she breaks free and works as a nightclub hostess; a brief fling as a prostitute leaves her awaiting the big adventure of her life on an island with a strange man and herself as a most unusual woman. All this experience is crowded into what is still a young woman’s span and is vividly described by what is undoubtedly a talented author who can make her diary pulsate.