Endless Beach by Jenny Colgan: book review

Endless Beach (2018) is set in contemporary times on the island of Mure in Scotland. That’s the good part about the book.

Flora works in the Summer Seaside Kitchen on the shore of the Endless Beach. Tourists love the area and the food, and she loves Joel, who is always travelling overseas. Her friend Lorna loves the local doctor, Saif, a refugee, but he’s still settling into a normal life. There is plenty of local expectations about love and marriage, and lots of gossip.

It’s a small community with small minds (although the author is trying to make the people complicated, their love complicated, their past complicated, and everything around them complicated). It doesn’t work. There are no worthy characters. There is no worthy plot. It’s a mash up mess.

Colgan could have developed the themes of the rugged isolated island and its way-out wildflowers and amazing animals, especially the narwhal. It’s a pity nature was underplayed: ‘two tiny puffs of cloud chased each other across the sky, and the water lapped far up the beach.’ That doesn’t explain why the remote island is special and why there are parochial views and opinions.

Why does the author repeatedly explain that the narwhal isn’t a whale? Is it because it’s analogous to the fact that intelligent humans aren’t intelligent?

I did persevere with the novel to the end, because I was reading it on a plane, but it was a strange story to me. Nevertheless, it is a best-seller, so many people will have a different view to mine.

MARTINA NICOLLSis an international aid and development consultant, and the authorof:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom(2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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