“I want to know how good at life I can be in a place where there are no distractions,” Nell Stevens explained to her mother on the phone. She had left her home in London to do a postgraduate degree at Boston University, and was now considering what to do during her “global fellowship” – a three-month study period in which students were encouraged to travel, explore, and write. “And where is that, exactly?” her mother asked. “The Falklands,” said Stevens. “I think it’s the Falklands.”
She doesn’t report her mother’s response – perhaps a puzzled silence. Stevens had no connection to the Falkland Islands, and had never been there before. She had no great interest in the islands’ history or culture, though she pretended otherwise on her fellowship application form. She had simply chosen the loneliest, most deserted and distraction-free place she could find, the aptly named Bleaker Island, a windswept outcrop of mud and rock in the southern Atlantic Ocean, part-time home to one farming couple, whose house she would be renting. Her only neighbours during her stay would be the flocks of penguins and beaky, vaguely sinister birds of prey called caracaras.
At 27, Stevens had been hankering throughout her adult life to write a novel, but life kept getting in the way: break-ups with boyfriends; soulless secretarial jobs; rent to pay, and the ever present lure of the internet. And there was another problem: she didn’t actually know what she wanted to write about. She had been cursed with a “boring” childhood, and classmates on her fiction course criticised her work for its lack of invention. Nothing less than extremity, total commitment and total isolation, she concluded, were what she needed to break the deadlock.
Bleaker House is the book that she did, in fact, pull together out of her stay on the island. But it isn’t the long-planned novel; it is a book about writing a book, a kind of bibliomemoir. It includes some narrative about Stevens’s predictably bleak and depressing time on Bleaker, during which she lived on a diet of instant soups and carefully rationed raisins (one of her conclusions is that, unsurprisingly, it’s quite hard to write when you are starving). We learn that being completely alone is not great for her mental health – she makes friends with a potato, and obsesses about face cancer – but it’s not quite bad enough for her mental health to be properly interesting. Her personal grooming does seriously suffer, however, and we are treated to descriptions of the dry skin she develops on her feet (no room on the micro-plane for a pumice), and several mentions of how much weight she loses.
As not much happens on Bleaker, these musings are necessarily interwoven with scraps of the novel she was trying to write (perhaps intended to illustrate the point that it was pretty awful), advice from her creative writing teacher, reminiscences of her life before Bleaker, and other fictional character studies. Stevens writes with considerable charm and winning honesty, but there is not enough here in the way of a sustained narrative; it is fragmentary, more of a scrapbook than a book. Its target readership is presumably other people who want to write books, but haven’t quite got around to it yet (when I recently got a job organising a literary festival, one old hand told me: “Make sure you put on events about how to write a book. They always sell out first”).
Stevens’s whole point, it should be made clear, is that she was foolish and naive to think that going to Bleaker could make her into a novelist. Frustratingly, though, she never subjects the original impulse to any scrutiny. Why did she want to write a novel, when she felt that she had nothing to say? She seems to have a sense of herself as “boring” and normal, and a drive to manufacture these big, daring adventures in order to compensate. She tells a story about how, after her first year at university, she took off for Lebanon to teach English in a refugee camp, inspired by a short story by the Palestinian writer Samir el-Youssef. But she felt nervous about teaching, and when war broke out and she was bundled out of the country by a private security firm, it came as something of a relief. More alarming is an anecdote about her responding to her classmates’ criticisms of her writing as “prudish” by scouring Craigslist for adverts placed by men seeking sex, and then responding to offer her services. She did this under a false name, but went on to meet one of them in person, alone, in the name of research. She was lucky that the consequences were nothing worse than an unwanted kiss.
The punchline, as she puts it, is that she did leave Bleaker with a book. But what kind of book? I’d say it’s a book by somebody who hasn’t quite figured herself out yet; a young writer who should, perhaps, have held off until she was ready to write the novel she had always dreamed of.
• Bleaker House is published by Picador. To order a copy for £11.04 (RRP £12.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
