(Host) Commentator Philip Baruth talks about the Champlain Islands, Wonder Woman, and his favorite island novelist, Vermont writer Elizabeth Inness-Brown.
(Baruth) Nobody had to tell me that islands were magical and dangerous places when I was growing up in the 1970s, because along with the Flash and Aquaman and the Fantastic Four, I read a lot of Wonder Woman comics. In Wonder Woman comics, Paradise Island was the home of the Amazons, and their warrior queen, Aphrodite. There was basically only one law on Paradise Island: Death to any man who attempted to set foot on it.
When I got older, I learned that almost every mainland in every country has this sort of love-fear relationship with its outlying islands: Africa has Zanzibar, China has Taiwan, and the United States has Cuba, an island so mythicized that a single orphaned Cuban boy washing up off the coast of Miami cost Al Gore the presidency in the last election.
Living in Burlington for the last 10 years, I’ve had plenty of occasions to travel to the Champlain Islands, and it’s impossible not to be enchanted by them, this extravagant series of self-contained kingdoms. But along with these brilliant temptations is the sense of some brooding, primal force in these islands, as with all islands. For that reason, maybe, I’ve mostly experienced Grand Isle and South Hero and North Hero in day trips, small cowardly sips from a dark, deep well. With one exception: Elizabeth Inness-Brown’s debut novel, “Burning Marguerite.”
Inness-Brown lives on South Hero, and in addition to being a mystery and a love-story-within-a-love-story-within-a-love-story, “Burning Marguerite” is a testament to her romance with the Champlain Islands. Don’t get me wrong, Inness-Brown’s is not a flowery or sugar-coated view of the place she’s made her home; it’s spare and accurate and intimately aware of the threat implied by water on all sides.
“As the lake road wended east around the northern edge of the island, the houses got fewer and poorer. Here the location wasn’t so good. You faced into the winter winds. You didn’t get the sunset. The water was marshy at its edge, the bottom mucky; mosquitoes swarmed as soon as summer came. These latter were problems that could be overcome, but only by a lot of money, and the money hadn’t gotten this far yet. Between the road and the lake grew some scrubby volunteer cedars; cattails stuck up out of the ice like quenched torches.”
The island is very much alive in “Burning Marguerite,” as complex and nuanced a character as Marguerite Deo, the frail 94-year-old woman found dead in a snowy woods in the novel’s first pages. By the time I reached the end, I felt as if I knew the Islands in a way I had I never had before, as though I’d lived a long and eventful life there, as though I’d raised children there and fished on the ice, long winter after long winter. I felt welcome, in a word. And that’s a rare feeling for a boy from the mainland, especially one raised on Wonder Woman comics.
Philip Baruth is a novelist living in Burlington. He teaches at the University of Vermont.