The Isles of Sunset

Arthur Christopher Benson understood solitude from the inside out. The son of an Archbishop of Canterbury, raised in a household marked by tragedy (two siblings died young, others suffered from what was almost certainly manic-depressive psychosis), Benson wrote this novel with the weight of personal experience. David, a young man fleeing a haunted childhood and devastating family loss, retreats to the rugged Isles of Sunset seeking something like peace, or perhaps God. What he finds instead is the hard bargain of genuine solitude: the landscape offers no comfort, only mirrors. This is not a novel of easy transcendence. Benson was too acquainted with darkness for that. The prose carries the measured cadence of someone who has wrestled with despair and survived, if not cured. For readers who find in Henry David Thoreau or Gerald Green a particular kind of honesty, this British counterpart offers a different but equally unflinching vision of what it means to withdraw from the world in order to find it again.