Twenty Thousand Saints

Fflur Dafydd

If you’ve ever thought about running away to a remote island, this is the book for you — a quiet story about quirky characters in a remarkable place: the real-life Bardsey Island off the coast of North Wales in the Irish Sea.

First, the island. It’s a wind-lashed, sea-splashed, travel-back-in-time kind of place. There’s no wi-fi, the homes don’t have electricity, and the only way on or off the island is a ferry that will not risk the trip in inclement weather.

The current year-round population is three people, along with 200 sheep, 25 Welsh Black cattle, 30,000 breeding pairs of a seabird called the Manx shearwater, and a colony of 200 Atlantic gray seals bobbing in the waters of the island’s rocky bays.

For millenia, Bardsey has been visited by fisherman, farmers, pirates, and religious pilgrims. By the 12th century, it was known as the ‘Island of 20,000 Saints,’ based on the myth that innumerable saints were buried there.

Which brings us now to our story.

The cast of characters is small and well drawn — mostly strangers to each other, their keeping secrets about their lives on and off the island. We meet an ambitious documentary film maker and her assistant, a very flirty ecologist, the writer in residence — a troubled poet with writers block — an archaeologist with murky motives, and a somewhat reluctant nun who wasn’t always so spiritually oriented.

Then, unexpectedly, a previous island resident arrives to further upset the equilibrium, and we learn that one islander went missing under mysterious circumstances a decade ago.

When the previously sunny summer weather turns so foul the ferry can’t come for days, you might start to think this is a whodunnit with a closed circle of suspects. But this is not the tale of amateur sleuths following clues. It’s a deeper story about people trying to feret out the truth to reckon with past trauma, make sense of their lives. move forward with a sense of, if not peace, at least acceptance.

In a different kind of book, that could be really heavy. But this is not. It’s got adventure, a hint of menace, and more than a little dark humor. Take, for example, Viv, the nun. She’s part of a loose community of hermit nuns who each live alone on different islands. The sisters periodically visit each other on their various island homes; this year, it’s Viv’s turn to host the hermit convention. Three other sisters will join her on Bardsey to pray, walk in nature, and take meals together — all in silence. Rather than welcome the company, Viv resents their intrusion and holier-than-thou attitudes. When her habit flaps in the breeze, earning scowls of judgment from her companions, Viv thinks, ‘It seemed that Sister Lucy’s sneezing and less-than-silent wind-breaking were allowed by means of some devout loophole in the fine-print of Godly silence.’

Author Fflur Dafydd writes in both Welsh and English. Her six novels have won a slew of awards and, in 2002, she was the Writer in Residence on Bardsey for six weeks. She clearly loved the island. Her descriptions of the scenery and weather are evocative and sensual, and along the way to her characters’ resolution, she unpacks challenging events in Welsh political history. The story is funny and sad, claustrophobic and expansive — with an understanding of how seemingly inconsequential interactions make an outsized impact this brutal, magical place made of crashing surf and vast sky.

She was used to decorating the island in her letters to Sister Mary Catherine, wondering how best to conjure up what it felt like, what it really felt like, to be roaming around here in a summer dusk; the heat roasting the sky a deep auburn, the lavender sea lathering at her feet, carrying with it air that was clean like spring water. But now she found it necessary to try to go beyond that, to explain that one sudden moment when the fresh breeze came gushing in, just before the door slammed, the sense she had in her own house, of someone being with her. Or what she felt when she roamed around the south end of the island, around those purple rocks, looking down into that thrashing whiteness. Living on Bardsey was somehow to live on the brink of things, but with a sense that there was something, or someone there, tenderly pushing back her toes from the precipice. There was always something bursting out of the place these days for her, flowers spilling over one another to be noticed, lichen sprouting its soft regalia along the stone walls, Manx Shearwaters racing out of their round-homes, and her among them, breathing quietly. And it wasn’t just what was around her that made it such a sanctuary, but the sea, a mainland unto itself. She still gazed at it with wonder every morning. Each night, she let it soothe her, praying in gratitude for its boundless mass which somehow spelled at once freedom and incarceration. The tide-race around her pulsed with life, but she knew that true power was here on this earth, blessed, beneath her feet. — Fflur Dafydd

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