Island Of Wings by Karin Altenberg

 

Neil McKenzie makes the decision to devote his life to God after a childhood accident in which a playmate is killed.  He spends his university education preparing and is ordained a minister.  He volunteers to take the most remote parish the Church has and is assigned St. Kilda, a small island off the Scottish coast which is so small and insignificant that it isn't on the map. 

Before he goes, he marries Lizzie.  Lizzie is nineteen and has no idea what marriage or the remoteness of life with no companions will be like.  The natives live in hovels and they don't speak English but a form of Gaelic which Neil also speaks.  They survive on the many birds that migrate there and on whatever they can get fishing.  Their animals live in the hovels with them and their manure is used as fertilizer for the minimal farming they do.  It is a life of poverty where sixty percent of all the babies born die within eight days.

Lizzie is pregnant with their first child but loses it after a miscarriage.  She loses other children as well but eventually the couple do have a family with children.  The native women don't fare as well, some having many children without any surviving and eventually they come to resent Lizzie and her children.  Neil is determined to improve the natives' lives both through his sermons and in practical terms with newer dwellings and a plan for farming.  

Over the years, Neil and Lizzie draw further and further apart.  Neil, like most men, is afraid to show his emotions and Lizzie is left isolated.  Eventually, her life is all about her children while Neil becomes more and more estranged from his family and other individuals.

This book is based on the true story of the couple who spent time on St. Kilda.  The reason for the babies' deaths was eventually discovered but too late to keep the inhabitants of the island going.  Altenberg has written an interesting novel about the trials of those who went to try to help native populations and it is of note that these men and women off the Scottish coast were just as poverty-stricken as any tribe on a Caribbean island or deep in the jungles of South America or Africa.  This book is recommended for readers of historical fiction.