Which is what makes it, and pretty much everything Maxwell wrote, so fascinating. His books represent – in their psychodramas and their ultraviolence – the dark side of British place-literature. To read them as hymns to tranquillity is trite. To engage with their tangled understories is mesmerising. Alongside them I would place TH White’s The Goshawk and JA Baker’s The Peregrine, which reads – in its obsessive tallying of body parts, bloodstains and kill paths – like an ornithological CSI. Compelled to recover what she could of their connection, Raine shared the unpublished manuscript of her private memoir. Maxwell read only as far as her ‘heart’s cry’ at the rowan and, feeling outraged and betrayed, he blamed Raine for every misfortune that had befallen him since. Inadvertently, her words had once again given a gift to the man she loved: his next book, Raven, Seek Thy Brother, which used the narrative framework of the curse of ‘a poetess’ to lay the decline of his now world-famous Highland paradise at her feet. Again, Raine’s name was withheld, but there was no obscuring her identity from anyone who had known either writer throughout the last near-twenty years. Island of Dreams is a beautifully written account of his time living there and his quest to better understand the mysterious Gavin Maxwell. The subsequent two books break down the façade a little and I think it's a shame that most people just read the first and accept it at face value. It does get a little depressing and self pitying though. It's also only really in the final book that he starts accepting some personal responsibility for events. Up until that point almost everything that goes wrong is due to someone else.

He took us by the hand to a world most of us had never seen, a world that sets the imagination aloft” John Lister-KayeI can understand why it was so famous and well received in the 60s, presenting an idyllic Eden. Man at one with nature, isolated and free. Except it's all myth. He later makes it clear that he embellished or at least presented a somewhat rosy version of the reality and the subsequent two books highlight the reality of a remote life surrounded by wild animals. Kirsten MacQuarrie is a writer in Scotland. Her work has been published by New Writing Scotland, The Scottish Poetry Library, Glasgow Women’s Library, Gutter Magazine, Scottish PEN, the Federation of Writers Scotland and others. She has been shortlisted for a Vogue Magazine Young Talent Award, twice winner of the Glasgow Women’s Library Poetry Prize and was a Non-Fiction judge for the Scottish National Book Awards 2021. Her first novel was Ellen and Arbor (2020) and her second will be The Rowan Tree, inspired by the true story of the ‘some-requited’ love between poet Kathleen Raine and author-naturalist Gavin Maxwell, forthcoming in 2023. Rare Gavin Maxwell LORDS OF THE ATLAS, House of Glaoua 1893-1956, 1st Ed in DJ, 1966 [Hardcover] Gavin Maxwell

The whole saga is simply an extraordinary tale of what many would view as an obsession undertaken in the most beautiful yet basic of environments. Kathleen Raine, ‘In Answer to a Letter Asking Me for Volumes of My Early Poems,’ from The Lost Country (1971) Kathleen Raine, manuscript poem, included in ‘The Written Word’: a speech delivered at the annual luncheon of the Poetry Society (1963).

An artistic temperament... Douglas Botting, Gavin Maxwell’s biographer, opines that Maxwell was bipolar. But Maxwell also drank a lot – which might explain those expansive evenings. I’m not sure Maxwell was an alcoholic, but drink was in his life (as it was in many more people’s lives in those less puritanical, post-war years). Hangovers make you crotchety, drink makes you contradictory. Also, by the time (and probably before) the house at Sandaig burnt down and he moved to the island, Maxwell was dying. Though he didn’t know it, the cancer that was to kill him was already eating away at him. When you’re facing an early death (Maxwell was only 55 when he went, in September 1969) or you’re in a lot of pain, there’s a lot of anger to deal with. And status and fame put pressures on people, and he was an outsider, in a world that was very tightly-wrapped.

The first half of this book explains Maxwell's remote property (called Camusfearna in the book, but not its real name) in Scotlands Western Highlands, and explaining in great detail its surroundings, and his peaceful existence there with Jonnie the spaniel. And then somewhat suddenly he introduces his short story about his first otter in Iraq, and then the obtaining of his second otter Mijbil, also from Iraq and the one year and one day spent with him. It explains the steep learning curve both parties went through, with an otter in semi-captivity. Gavin Maxwell was a Scottish naturalist and author, best known for his work with otters. He was born in Scotland in 1914 to Lieutenant-Colonel Aymer Maxwell and Lady Mary Percy, whose father was the seventh Duke of Northumberland. He was raised in the small village of Elrig, near Port William, which he later described in his autobiography The House of Elrig (1965). Mij's inquisitive and adventurous nature leads him some distance from the cottage to a female otter with whom he spends the day. Ignorant of danger, he is caught in a net and nearly killed. The humans find him and help him recover. Graham spends a significant amount of time drawing Mij, but realises that to show the true agility of the otter he must draw it underwater. He builds a large tank out of old windows so that he can do this. What surprised me the most was my changed response to this book. I was not happy by the read as I had been when younger. It reminded me of my desire to acquire my own otter, and then thought of all the crazy kids in the 60's and 70's like me that wanted exotic pets (I'm thinking of Tiger King, here!). It seems to me these kind of stories may have helped that unfortunate trend along. Wouldn't the poor creatures been better left in their natural environments?

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Gavin Maxwell was a naturalist and well-known author in the 1950's, who lived in Northern Scotland, a sparsely populated part of the country with a harsh climate. This was his best selling book about that life and about the 2 otters that he adopted as pets. He wasn't a hermit, as he had a lot of visitors and also traveled widely. His writing about the natural world and the animals was descriptive and lovely. Maxwell's joys are tempered by daily trials and tragedy, but he recounts events without apology, particularly in the latter two books.