The island is situated between Ireland and Cornwall. It’s so nice and strategically unimportant that no country takes ownership of it. On most maps it is shown as a rock poking out through the sea surface. Just before the great crisis, this piece of land was bought by Thomas Hobson, an American millionaire. He built a big house and then put an announcement in the English press: ‘An animal-loving, vegetarian couple wanted to take care of a secluded residence, full maintenance”. The offer was accepted by the Shepherd family, who became the only inhabitants of the island. From time to time they are visited by representatives of the Swiss trust which bought the rights to this piece of land after the millionaire’s death.
Everything changes when British intelligence chooses the island as the abode for the recently overturned dictator of Bukumla, Africa. The ‘rock’ suddenly becomes of interest to the neighbouring countries, and spies, soldiers, and shady characters who start landing there. The innocence of the island is lost. If it wasn’t enough, Hobson’s grandson suddenly appears. He wants to take back the right to this land and turn it into a tourist resort. What’s more, next to the shore a mysterious ship anchors, full of – as it turns out – giggling monkeys.
A few of the characters (Bukumla’s dictator, Duchess Zuppa and Dr Goldfinger, John St. Austell) had already appeared in Themerson’s previous books – the plot of Hobson’s Island takes place in the same universe as General Piesc, Cardinal Pölätüo and The Mystery of the Sardine. Compared to those, Themerson’s last novel has one distinct protagonist. Sean D’Earth (who could be considered Themerson’s alter-ego) is a kind-hearted, sad old man, who spends his time on philosophical cogitation. He doesn’t come to the island, but watches the catastrophic events unfold from a distance. It’s worth mentioning that when he was young, he changed his surname from D’Eath (there are people with this surname living in Britain), because it would sound bad in the military.
Themerson’s writing is characterized by the characters' amazing form, even those in supporting roles. The writer builds a tangled net of family and social relations which forms an inexhaustible source of comedy. A linear narrative is not enough for him though – the story accelerates and slows down, it jumps backward and forward in time, and readers get to know parts of the story not from the narrator, but from other protagonists who talk or write about them (for example, in a letter). In Hobson’s Island Themerson’s writing technique reaches a level of clarity and maturity that wasn’t yet achieved in Tom Harris or Cardinal Pölätüo. Thanks to this, without losing any part of the plot or losing ourselves in the meandering narrative, we meet three generations of the Shepherds and the D’Earths, at the same time travelling through the whole 20th century.
