Islands of Mercy

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Her love is not without its troubles but it is flexible and capacious, its soft power contrasting with the violence of disappointed guys.

After this encounter with Valentine, Jane goes to London to spend time with her childless, unmarried, financially independent Aunt Emmilene, an artist. All of the senses are engaged, sound being strong, smell being overwhelming from sweet perfume to the stench of disease. The parts of the novel set in Borneo (and there were a lot of them) also seemed to have little to do with her theme. During an encounter with Savage, Leon is torn between an obstinate wish “to say that he was tired of being subservient to the rajah” and the stirrings of “a feeling he refused to name as love”.The female characters are admirable- I love Clorinda’s work ethic and desire to overcome the poverty and famine of her native Ireland, I love Jane’s independence and unconventionality which is at total odds with the times, something she perhaps inherits from her artist Aunt Emmeline. Savage acts as a local “rajah” in Borneo, a self-described “lover of young men who believes that he alone is the guarantor of his subjects’ happiness yet has achieved nothing toward that end other than overseeing construction of a road that goes no further than his own property”. Währenddessen hat sich Valentines Bruder Edmund, ein Naturforscher, auf ein gefährliches Abenteuer im Dschungel Borneos begeben. The short chapters dealing with one of five or six characters are almost like short stories but of course link up to a larger narrative arc that connects everyone together. One day in her tea room, there is a proposal of marriage made by a well-known Bath physician, Valentine Ross, who works for the esteemed doctor Sir William Adeane; Ross asks Adeane’s daughter, Jane who works as a nurse for her father.

Meanwhile, on the wild island of Borneo, an eccentric British 'rajah', Sir Ralph Savage, overflowing with philanthropy but compromised by his passions, sees his schemes relentlessly undermined by his own fragility, by man's innate greed and by the invasive power of the forest itself. Jane decides to go back to Bath where her father lives to help her father and her aunt Emmeline, a painter.Sir Ralph is intent on improving what the Creator has given him telling his lover that he wished to go down in history as one who had 'enabled happiness'. After rejecting Ross’s proposal, Jane decamps to London, seeking refuge with her aunt Emmeline, a successful painter who introduces her to bohemian London society. Andererseits wird der Leser in die viktorianische Epoche im exotischen Borneo versetzt, wo sich eine völlig andere Welt als in England auftut.