Islands

Islands, by Marta Randall, is an old science fiction novel from 1976 that I first heard of over at Pages Turned and read in a couple of hours while sitting by a public pool mostly full of mothers and small children.

I'm starting to get to the age where mothers don't automatically smile at me when I smile at their small children. It's an age when teenagers' eyes glide right over me, an age when I'm told where I can sit at the pool so I can't watch what my younger teenager is doing. In short, I'm at the perfect age for reading Islands, about a woman who ages in a world where no one else does.

The setting of the novel is far in the future, after our world has been destroyed by global warming and other environmental meddling, with much of the seacoast and all of the Hawaiian islands (of the title) underwater since "The Great Shaping" a few millennia back. People can now be made immortal, except for Tia, on whom the process failed. Tia is now 67 years old in a world where no one else ages past their twenties, and everyone she meets is repelled by her existence and what it implies.

The immortals are terribly afraid of accidental death or dismemberment:
"The road and the land through which it passed were beautiful, but my passengers were so bound up in their fear that they did not sense the beauty, and I found myself once again exasperated by the typical, infuriating terror of the Immortals."

Tia's lover from her 20's, Paul, now an immortal and still with the same appearance he had in his 20's, has joined her--after decades of separation she imposed--on an expedition to dive for artifacts from the big island of Hawaii. They resume their sexual relationship, and Tia tries to reserve judgment about his motives for sleeping with a 67-year-old.

The reader learns how Tia has spent her life trying to come to terms with her mortality. The immortality process doesn't work on animals, so she feels that the immortals regard her as an animal. Oddly, though, their fear of anything physically risky and their lack of ambition and contented ignorance show them to be something less than human.

I loved this explanation about the dive:
"There are," Greville announced, "some plans to try underwater excavation of the west side of the island, what the natives called the, uh, um, Coffee Side."

The artifacts they bring up are mostly sold to collectors or kept as curiosities:
"Never mind what it was once for, or why it was created, or when it was used. Never mind what the lives of its original owners were like. It doesn't matter what it ultimately means, what it says about the culture that created and used it. It's a curiosity, a gimcrack, a decoration, a pretty, and no other meaning is necessary."

In the end, Tia learns some things she has been too afraid and too arrogant to find out before, and through the very mystical ending, she goes farther towards becoming wise, the traditional consolation of the old. One of the things she learns is what all old people who don't want to be shaking their canes and ordering kids off their lawn have to learn, that just because someone is young doesn't mean that he doesn't have anything to teach someone older.

Have you learned anything from someone younger lately?