A few of Flyn’s destinations are firmly established on the dubious ruin-tourism trail...But she also visits unfamiliar places ... Her account of her journey to Swona is among the most haunting in this memorable book ... Modern nature writing has evolved to be a little more tough-nosed than it was in the days of Evelyn Waugh’s feather-footed questing vole, but it can still be blighted by a self-conscious high style. Flyn, a journalist, thankfully keeps a tight rein on this, writing taut and interesting descriptions of the places she visits, deploying artful images and unobtrusive wit. The arsenal of facts and figures is well targeted. Only at the end of each chapter does the high style creep in. Sentences shorten. Swallows wheel. The page turns. But it’s kept to nontoxic levels ... gives us grounds for hope, while not understating the huge task that awaits us in changing course away from catastrophe ... This is a fresh, provocative and valuable book.
... brave, thorough ... fascinating, eerie and strange. And because the author has chosen to, it eventually nudges towards the optimistic ... There is some thrilling writing here, a fine way with the telling detail, and a plea for radical revisioning of what we mean by 'nature' and 'wild'. One wonders if there is a Pollyanna-ism at work, a willed optimism that might provide licence for future destruction because, we might say, sometime in the deep future, life will prevail. Flyn is alert to this, acknowledges that she is focusing on the silver linings – and acknowledges, too, the heavy losses that will result from global warming. The pockets of enticing abandonment we create with a mine here or a quarry there will be as nought to the Earth-changing, human-induced climate change. When it comes to planetary impact, 'We are the meteor, we are the volcano.' And what will survive of that?
While her travels to these locations form the central focus of each chapter, Flyn weaves so much more into the fabric of this book. Social histories, comparisons to similar cases across the globe and references to cultural touchstones help illuminate the areas’ current state further. But it’s Flyn’s lyrical, incredibly evocative writing style that truly brings the book to life; her time on Swona in the Orkney Isles is memorable for bookending its historical perspective with somewhat gothic undertones describing her stay ... Through this, Flyn interrogates the ecological impact of human activity on each location and to what extent nature can bounce back in a truly engaging manner. By turns cautionary but with glimmers of hope, Islands of Abandonment is not only a compelling travelogue but also a fascinating insight into the relationship between man and nature.
... studded with arresting facts ... Flyn has a lovely turn of phrase and is at her best describing what she sees ... Sometimes, though, the Curse of the Nature Writer strikes and an annoying feyness takes hold. She becomes bizarrely precious when talking about urban blight in Detroit ... fascinating and brain-energising. It is full of detail and colour that sends one googling, to look up pictures and find out more. It is also an optimistic book ... While Flyn is at pains to say that we mustn’t stop the fight against man-made climate change or the pillaging of the wild, she also suggests that they show that nature, with time, can rebound. These 'forbidden experiments' of spontaneous rewilding 'are torches burning in a darkened landscape'. I’ll cling to that bit of unfashionable hope.
Flyn is an energetic guide ... picturesquely punctuated with the literature and art of rot and renewal ... In her own imagery, and the rhythms of her prose, Flyn has to wrestle with a perennial problem in writing about ruins: all descriptions, no matter how diverse in time or place, tend to the same familiar slump, the same unhappy details. The temptation is to try and energize each example with new vocabulary, new metaphors, and new sensations. They don’t always come across. One finds oneself, like Flyn, reaching for gothic verbs and adjectives...Or you claim insights and intuitions that readers may not credit ... at its best when Flyn is describing dilapidated or reborn places where spectral anthropomorphism can get no purchase, where things are simply too inhuman.
Just when you thought there was nowhere left to explore, along comes an author with a new category of terrain — not scenes where man has never trod, but places where he has been and gone ... For reasons of safety or budget or both, Flyn doesn’t visit all the places she writes about. But the dozen sites she sees, each of which forms a chapter, she describes with dazzling flair. Just occasionally, she gets pretentious ... But in general her prose is as pragmatic as it is poetic ... Flyn is careful not to say we can relax about the scale of damage we have done, and continue to do, to the environment. But clearly, nature’s capacity for recovery must be a part of the picture.
Flyn writes with the soul of a poet and the eye of a painter, evoking the beauty and the horror to be found in decimated places that, through abandonment, invited the most tenacious and patient forms of life to survive and revive.
... strangely beautiful ... Though the tension is palpable, Flyn’s narrative voice remains calm, even as she ignores prohibitory signs, crawls under barbed wire, sloshes around in toxic muck, or spelunks in abandoned structures. Visiting places where nature is flourishing in our absence, she captures searing images of both waste and regeneration. Flyn presents a balanced approach to her subject; she carefully avoids venturing too far into disaster tourism and instead considers the psychological and sociological implications of urban decay. She concludes by stressing the redemptive possibilities of feral ecosystems and noting the ongoing impact of climate change on these locations ... With this absorbing mix of ecology, social history, and travel (even if for most readers, it’ll be of the armchair sort), Flyn offers a hopeful way of seeing often-overlooked landscapes.
... riveting ... Through lush and poetic language, she captures the vital forces at work in the natural world. This is nature writing at its most potent.
... fascinating ... Though enthusiastic, Flyn is not letting humans off easy for their mistakes. She offers eye-opening statistics about the irreparable damage humans have created and grim warnings if such activity continues. In addition to the ecological effects, Flyn also discusses the psychological damage abandonment has wrought on humans still in the area ... A compelling reflection on the extraordinary healing power of nature when it is left to its own devices.
