As an Eilean

23/05/2026

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Based on a couple of works by Iain Crichton Smith, Last Summer and ‘The Hermit’, and invoking a third in its title, On the Island, Mike Alexander’s fine Gaelic-language film As an Eilean inverts the kaleyard tradition (Whiskey Galore!, Brigadoon and Local Hero), by suggesting that village communities are more likely divided than united, and often, if united at all, by the presence of a scapegoat. One needn’t think any the less of Local Hero and co., in their generally optimistic accounts of happy and often canny folk, to see that in keeping with Smith’s writings, this is the sort of place that people shouldn’t escape to, but, if anything, escape from. The more thoughtful and sensitive one happens to be, the greater the need for this retreat. Either into oneself or from the place, and this is evident chiefly in two characters. One, the youthful and bright Callum, and the teacher MacAlasdair (Ken Hutchison). Callum will soon be off to the mainland to study, while  MacAlasdair has long retreated into himself, with his wife having passed away years before.
The film may give the impression of a slow pace, but it has plenty of plot points. Over the course of the few days in which it is set, Callum not only prepares to leave but also finds burgeoning first love with classmate Kirsty, and MacAlisdair is propositioned by a former student, Janet, who is about to be married and whose fiancé is returning from the US. Then there is the outsider, a hermit-like figure who doesn’t talk to anybody, and with the locals imposing upon this stranger, initially, interpretations, and eventually resentful feelings as he becomes a scapegoat.
While kailyard, a Scottish narrative genre which shows village life as relatively idyllic, often suggests, whatever minor setbacks, the community offers the best of all possible worlds, As an Eilean indicates close to the worst of them. The weather is often grim, the characters glum, and the place is permeated by a Presbyterian puritanism that can turn Callum’s visit to Kirsty on the sabbath into a scandal. This is a world where disapproval is common, and even the fight against it can seem disapproving. When a crofter muses over the hermit, he says he is only guessing because the hermit never speaks. MacAlisdair says, exactly, and thus it is only his interpretation. (Someone else wonders if he is a Falklands veteran suffering from shell-shock) The crofter’s nickname is El Valparaiso, because many years earlier, he visited the Chilean town and came back, and, in singing its praises, the place became his nickname. He speaks of oranges and apricots hanging from the trees. MacAlisdair says all they have where they are is stones. Speaking of Robin Jenkins and Smith, Timothy C. Baker says, ‘‘both authors repeatedly focus on the relation between the writer and community. In their novels, as in the kailyard fictions of J. M. Barrie, ‘the values which this past community embody are challenged by a modern frame of mind’.’ Baker notes that, “The writer, a figure outside of the community, is used as a palimpsest through whom the reader can experience a cohesive form of community now thought lost.’’ (‘George Mackay Brown and the Philosophy of Community‘)
We might wonder in As an Eilean if it was ever there. It would perhaps be the difference between sadness and bitterness. To feel you are living in a place that is no longer so beautiful, vibrant and hopeful may lead to a sad feeling, but to believe that you are stuck in a place that never possessed any of these things is more likely to leave one bitter. When Janet asks MacAlisdair about his late wife, as she sits with him in his living room, he looks up at her photograph and says “All those years she was never really happy here. I don’t know if it was me or the village.’’ He adds that she used to play the violin very well and was in an orchestra when they were in Edinburgh. She seemed to stop playing after they moved to the island, and Janet asks if he ever played anything. He says he played at a lot of things, as we hear in his voice more bitterness than sadness.
When McIntyre returns to Texas in Local Hero, the film captures a wistful longing in that famous shot of the telephone box at the film’s conclusion. When Callum leaves at the end of As an Eilean, we might believe he will be glad to see the back of the place. The film’s final images are chiefly despondent. A sedate montage shows us MacAlisdair supping a whisky, while his wife’s photo is no longer on the wall but lying on a table nearby, Janet sitting in tears, a shot of the ferry making its way to the mainland under overcast skies, and then a cut to Callum on the boat. The suggestion is that Callum may just escape the bitterness that has engulfed MacAlisdair, and which may well do the same to Janet. As he says earlier to Kirsty, about leaving the island and going to university: It can’t come soon enough.’
Often in Scottish film discourse, the inversion of Kailyard is Clydesidism, seeing the happy, rural village contrasted with the darkening despair of urban blight. Yet just as Bill Forsyth could take that bleak expectation and turn it inside out as he infused Glasgow with a spirit of optimism when offering a sly solution to an intractable ice cream war between rival gangs in Comfort and Joy,, so Mike Alexander takes the expected affirmation found in Kailyard films and insists there is plenty of despondency to be extracted from it. Films in Scotland may believe ‘‘this is not some heavy, oppressive doom; there is something wistful to the proceedings, a languid nostalgia,’’ but we are more inclined to see a revisionist account of Kailyard that illustrates there is no need for nostalgia when we see Callum on the boat. The closest reason he may have to stay would be Kirsty, but he looks like he may have sabotaged that already, and she might well head to the mainland as well. Her great, great grandfather is described as one of the island’s great love poets, though, as Kirsty says to the teacher who invokes him, these were letters he wrote to his wife from Australia. Maybe absence makes the heart grow fonder, as if at least one person in a couple leaving the island can sustain affection. It didn’t seem MacAlisdair and his wife managed to sustain theirs by being on it together.
The film might be directed by Alexander and written by Douglas Eadie, who worked together previously on a film about Gramsci, while Eadie wrote and directed a film about Sorley McLean, whom the teacher here talks about as the greatest of Scottish poets. Yet the sensibility seems to be Iain Crichton Smith’s.  Speaking of his work, Smith says that he was drawn to the ‘‘bleakness and bareness of Lewis,’’ and saw it as perhaps a ‘‘Calvinist honesty’’, resisting ‘the dazzling light’’ (Scottish Literary Journal) In ‘The Hermit’, the narrator talks of his wife who played music and couldn’t speak Gaelic, describing her as ‘‘an alien with a violin which she couldn’t bring herself to play and which remained silent in that room since no one could appreciate her music.’’ In On the Island, the young boy is viewed as university material, while around him are signs of failure, including a footballer who gets drunk as he works up the courage to play a game, where the locals expect much from him, and someone else who comes back from the United States a disappointment, and also disappointed. He is regularly drunk and takes his life.
Yet this needn’t mean that Smith is unequivocally dismissive of island existence. There may be problems with the community, but a community it is. ‘‘It is this sense of a community that one thinks of most when one compares the island with the city. It was because of the community that the fact of exile became so desolating and frightening. For to become an exile is to become an individual on one's own in a world in which there is no community. It is not leaving the island or the village that is the terrible thing, it is leaving the community.’’ (‘Real People in a Real Place’) The problem rests on turning the people into more complex beings than Kailyard may usually allow, as if those in Kailyard are fundamentally happier, more naive and more benevolent than anybody else. ‘‘It is the dismissal of the islander as if he were not intelligent, as if he did not judge as other people judge, that is the most irritating thing of all, and the cause of the central error.’’ (‘Real People in a Real Place’) To resist the cliches of kailyard isn’t to arrive at its antithesis, but it is to give texture to a place that risks becoming calcified into images that might suit the tourist, but doesn’t reflect the local.
Perhaps one reason why Smith is resistant to the complacent image of island living rests on his interest in the scapegoat, which needn’t take the extreme form we find so brilliantly manifest in another account of the Scottish Hebrides (The Wicker Man), but in an approach potentially no less destructive. In Robin Hardy’s horror film, a police officer from the mainland goes to an idyllic island looking for someone who will be sacrificed to the Gods in this pagan place. In As an Eilean, scapegoating is based on gossip, moral disapproval, collective pettiness and superstition. The first is evident when various locals comment on the hermit; the second on anybody who subverts the social expectations of the sabbath, a day of worship and rest, and that cannot countenance a young man zooming off on a motorbike to spend some time with a woman he fancies. The pettiness shows up when the hermit goes into the local shop, and the locals tell him to get out and physically remove him from the premises. The superstition is evident when, after El Valparaiso dies from a heart attack, a woman starts throwing stones at the hermit, telling him to get away from them. The suggestion is that he is a bad omen, and when local tragedy can be justified by a foreign presence, why not use the outsider to expunge one’s fears and resentments?
The risk of an overly optimistic presentation, in showing the glories of village life, is that it fails to consider what holds a community firm, which will be a mixture of communication, necessity and togetherness, with a dash of victimising when an outsider appears, as we have noted with the hermit-like figure. Communication and togetherness can seem like the same thing, but the internet has shown that they can be antithetical. When communication indicates the asocial, and togetherness the social, we can comprehend the difference. Looking at American society, Derek Thompson says that ‘‘the first half of the 20th century was extraordinarily social. From 1900 to 1960, church membership surged, as did labor-union participation. […] Associations of all sorts thrived, including book clubs and volunteer groups. The New Deal made America’s branch-library system the envy of the world; communities and developers across the country built theaters, music venues, playgrounds, and all kinds of gathering places.’’ (Atlantic Monthly) The  steady erosion may have started in the 70s, but obviously, technological advances exacerbated it. Yet this leads to the third aspect, necessity, or what Richard V. Reeves calls, in the Atlantic article, neededness. ‘‘For men, as for women, something hard to define is lost when we pursue a life of isolationist comforts. ‘Neededness’ is the way we make ourselves essential to our families and community. “I think at some level, we all need to feel like we’re a jigsaw piece that’s going to fit into a jigsaw somewhere.” This neededness can come in several forms: social, economic, or communitarian, and might be a variation of what Smith sees as one's “cliu, one's reputation, one's status in the community.’’ Smith says, ‘‘This would last, because of the communal memory to the end of time. The judgment was indeed to the fourth generation and beyond. There was a policeman but there was no need for one. Why should there be when the community itself passed judgment? A judgment what was more rigorous than any that the law could impose.’’ (‘Real People in a Real Place’)
Cliu, like neededness, seems to indicate a sense of belonging based partly on necessity, in having a function within the community. It allows people to act together, but both words are operative: the act of doing and the sense of belonging. However, the idea that a healthy community should be able to tolerate those who choose not to act, nor to interact, has often interested Smith. It might be a sign of a community’s health that it needn’t scapegoat those who don’t fit in, while also creating a milieu where people can, if they wish to do so. Thompson may be right to believe that one feels the need to be part of the jigsaw, but equally, this should also be an individual’s desire, and not only a societal demand. If it becomes chiefly the latter, with little interest or respect for the individual, it creates a bigoted milieu that cannot accept difference.
In the film, people know nothing about the outsider in their midst, but his purpose isn’t to be accepted but to be interpreted. Though El Valpairoso doesn’t say anything negative about the hermit, it is still an assumption too far for MacAlisdair, who says each to his own. Just before the conclusion, Callum says to the teacher, he spoke to the hermit but not in words. They sat near each other at a beachhead and said nothing. Callum reckons if he could only turn that silence into words someday, this would be poetry, but MacAlisdair disagrees, saying it would be unbearable. As he is downing a whisky and drowning in sorrow after his lover’s fiancé has returned, we should be wary of taking his words too seriously, but the filmmaker might agree that language has its limits. Just after this scene, Callum goes out to the hermit’s hut and finds him absent, perhaps having left permanently. He does find a guitar, however, the same type as the fiancé’s, and briefly strums it as he might be better finding music out of silence over language, in contrast to the ending of Smith’s ‘The Hermit’, with its final sentence, ‘In the beginning was the Word.’ Communities are best seen convivially as a combination of words, silence and music, and Alexander does justice to all three in adapting Smith’s work,  nd in having the advantage of cinema, which, after all, can combine all three.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

As an Eilean

Based on a couple of works by Iain Crichton Smith, Last Summer and ‘The Hermit’, and invoking a third in its title, On the Island, Mike Alexander’s fine Gaelic-language film As an Eilean inverts the kaleyard tradition (Whiskey Galore!, Brigadoon and Local Hero), by suggesting that village communities are more likely divided than united, and often, if united at all, by the presence of a scapegoat. One needn’t think any the less of Local Hero and co., in their generally optimistic accounts of happy and often canny folk, to see that in keeping with Smith’s writings, this is the sort of place that people shouldn’t escape to, but, if anything, escape from. The more thoughtful and sensitive one happens to be, the greater the need for this retreat. Either into oneself or from the place, and this is evident chiefly in two characters. One, the youthful and bright Callum, and the teacher MacAlasdair (Ken Hutchison). Callum will soon be off to the mainland to study, while  MacAlasdair has long retreated into himself, with his wife having passed away years before.
The film may give the impression of a slow pace, but it has plenty of plot points. Over the course of the few days in which it is set, Callum not only prepares to leave but also finds burgeoning first love with classmate Kirsty, and MacAlisdair is propositioned by a former student, Janet, who is about to be married and whose fiancé is returning from the US. Then there is the outsider, a hermit-like figure who doesn’t talk to anybody, and with the locals imposing upon this stranger, initially, interpretations, and eventually resentful feelings as he becomes a scapegoat.
While kailyard, a Scottish narrative genre which shows village life as relatively idyllic, often suggests, whatever minor setbacks, the community offers the best of all possible worlds, As an Eilean indicates close to the worst of them. The weather is often grim, the characters glum, and the place is permeated by a Presbyterian puritanism that can turn Callum’s visit to Kirsty on the sabbath into a scandal. This is a world where disapproval is common, and even the fight against it can seem disapproving. When a crofter muses over the hermit, he says he is only guessing because the hermit never speaks. MacAlisdair says, exactly, and thus it is only his interpretation. (Someone else wonders if he is a Falklands veteran suffering from shell-shock) The crofter’s nickname is El Valparaiso, because many years earlier, he visited the Chilean town and came back, and, in singing its praises, the place became his nickname. He speaks of oranges and apricots hanging from the trees. MacAlisdair says all they have where they are is stones. Speaking of Robin Jenkins and Smith, Timothy C. Baker says, ‘‘both authors repeatedly focus on the relation between the writer and community. In their novels, as in the kailyard fictions of J. M. Barrie, ‘the values which this past community embody are challenged by a modern frame of mind’.’ Baker notes that, “The writer, a figure outside of the community, is used as a palimpsest through whom the reader can experience a cohesive form of community now thought lost.’’ (‘George Mackay Brown and the Philosophy of Community‘)
We might wonder in As an Eilean if it was ever there. It would perhaps be the difference between sadness and bitterness. To feel you are living in a place that is no longer so beautiful, vibrant and hopeful may lead to a sad feeling, but to believe that you are stuck in a place that never possessed any of these things is more likely to leave one bitter. When Janet asks MacAlisdair about his late wife, as she sits with him in his living room, he looks up at her photograph and says “All those years she was never really happy here. I don’t know if it was me or the village.’’ He adds that she used to play the violin very well and was in an orchestra when they were in Edinburgh. She seemed to stop playing after they moved to the island, and Janet asks if he ever played anything. He says he played at a lot of things, as we hear in his voice more bitterness than sadness.
When McIntyre returns to Texas in Local Hero, the film captures a wistful longing in that famous shot of the telephone box at the film’s conclusion. When Callum leaves at the end of As an Eilean, we might believe he will be glad to see the back of the place. The film’s final images are chiefly despondent. A sedate montage shows us MacAlisdair supping a whisky, while his wife’s photo is no longer on the wall but lying on a table nearby, Janet sitting in tears, a shot of the ferry making its way to the mainland under overcast skies, and then a cut to Callum on the boat. The suggestion is that Callum may just escape the bitterness that has engulfed MacAlisdair, and which may well do the same to Janet. As he says earlier to Kirsty, about leaving the island and going to university: It can’t come soon enough.’
Often in Scottish film discourse, the inversion of Kailyard is Clydesidism, seeing the happy, rural village contrasted with the darkening despair of urban blight. Yet just as Bill Forsyth could take that bleak expectation and turn it inside out as he infused Glasgow with a spirit of optimism when offering a sly solution to an intractable ice cream war between rival gangs in Comfort and Joy,, so Mike Alexander takes the expected affirmation found in Kailyard films and insists there is plenty of despondency to be extracted from it. Films in Scotland may believe ‘‘this is not some heavy, oppressive doom; there is something wistful to the proceedings, a languid nostalgia,’’ but we are more inclined to see a revisionist account of Kailyard that illustrates there is no need for nostalgia when we see Callum on the boat. The closest reason he may have to stay would be Kirsty, but he looks like he may have sabotaged that already, and she might well head to the mainland as well. Her great, great grandfather is described as one of the island’s great love poets, though, as Kirsty says to the teacher who invokes him, these were letters he wrote to his wife from Australia. Maybe absence makes the heart grow fonder, as if at least one person in a couple leaving the island can sustain affection. It didn’t seem MacAlisdair and his wife managed to sustain theirs by being on it together.
The film might be directed by Alexander and written by Douglas Eadie, who worked together previously on a film about Gramsci, while Eadie wrote and directed a film about Sorley McLean, whom the teacher here talks about as the greatest of Scottish poets. Yet the sensibility seems to be Iain Crichton Smith’s.  Speaking of his work, Smith says that he was drawn to the ‘‘bleakness and bareness of Lewis,’’ and saw it as perhaps a ‘‘Calvinist honesty’’, resisting ‘the dazzling light’’ (Scottish Literary Journal) In ‘The Hermit’, the narrator talks of his wife who played music and couldn’t speak Gaelic, describing her as ‘‘an alien with a violin which she couldn’t bring herself to play and which remained silent in that room since no one could appreciate her music.’’ In On the Island, the young boy is viewed as university material, while around him are signs of failure, including a footballer who gets drunk as he works up the courage to play a game, where the locals expect much from him, and someone else who comes back from the United States a disappointment, and also disappointed. He is regularly drunk and takes his life.
Yet this needn’t mean that Smith is unequivocally dismissive of island existence. There may be problems with the community, but a community it is. ‘‘It is this sense of a community that one thinks of most when one compares the island with the city. It was because of the community that the fact of exile became so desolating and frightening. For to become an exile is to become an individual on one's own in a world in which there is no community. It is not leaving the island or the village that is the terrible thing, it is leaving the community.’’ (‘Real People in a Real Place’) The problem rests on turning the people into more complex beings than Kailyard may usually allow, as if those in Kailyard are fundamentally happier, more naive and more benevolent than anybody else. ‘‘It is the dismissal of the islander as if he were not intelligent, as if he did not judge as other people judge, that is the most irritating thing of all, and the cause of the central error.’’ (‘Real People in a Real Place’) To resist the cliches of kailyard isn’t to arrive at its antithesis, but it is to give texture to a place that risks becoming calcified into images that might suit the tourist, but doesn’t reflect the local.
Perhaps one reason why Smith is resistant to the complacent image of island living rests on his interest in the scapegoat, which needn’t take the extreme form we find so brilliantly manifest in another account of the Scottish Hebrides (The Wicker Man), but in an approach potentially no less destructive. In Robin Hardy’s horror film, a police officer from the mainland goes to an idyllic island looking for someone who will be sacrificed to the Gods in this pagan place. In As an Eilean, scapegoating is based on gossip, moral disapproval, collective pettiness and superstition. The first is evident when various locals comment on the hermit; the second on anybody who subverts the social expectations of the sabbath, a day of worship and rest, and that cannot countenance a young man zooming off on a motorbike to spend some time with a woman he fancies. The pettiness shows up when the hermit goes into the local shop, and the locals tell him to get out and physically remove him from the premises. The superstition is evident when, after El Valparaiso dies from a heart attack, a woman starts throwing stones at the hermit, telling him to get away from them. The suggestion is that he is a bad omen, and when local tragedy can be justified by a foreign presence, why not use the outsider to expunge one’s fears and resentments?
The risk of an overly optimistic presentation, in showing the glories of village life, is that it fails to consider what holds a community firm, which will be a mixture of communication, necessity and togetherness, with a dash of victimising when an outsider appears, as we have noted with the hermit-like figure. Communication and togetherness can seem like the same thing, but the internet has shown that they can be antithetical. When communication indicates the asocial, and togetherness the social, we can comprehend the difference. Looking at American society, Derek Thompson says that ‘‘the first half of the 20th century was extraordinarily social. From 1900 to 1960, church membership surged, as did labor-union participation. […] Associations of all sorts thrived, including book clubs and volunteer groups. The New Deal made America’s branch-library system the envy of the world; communities and developers across the country built theaters, music venues, playgrounds, and all kinds of gathering places.’’ (Atlantic Monthly) The  steady erosion may have started in the 70s, but obviously, technological advances exacerbated it. Yet this leads to the third aspect, necessity, or what Richard V. Reeves calls, in the Atlantic article, neededness. ‘‘For men, as for women, something hard to define is lost when we pursue a life of isolationist comforts. ‘Neededness’ is the way we make ourselves essential to our families and community. “I think at some level, we all need to feel like we’re a jigsaw piece that’s going to fit into a jigsaw somewhere.” This neededness can come in several forms: social, economic, or communitarian, and might be a variation of what Smith sees as one's “cliu, one's reputation, one's status in the community.’’ Smith says, ‘‘This would last, because of the communal memory to the end of time. The judgment was indeed to the fourth generation and beyond. There was a policeman but there was no need for one. Why should there be when the community itself passed judgment? A judgment what was more rigorous than any that the law could impose.’’ (‘Real People in a Real Place’)
Cliu, like neededness, seems to indicate a sense of belonging based partly on necessity, in having a function within the community. It allows people to act together, but both words are operative: the act of doing and the sense of belonging. However, the idea that a healthy community should be able to tolerate those who choose not to act, nor to interact, has often interested Smith. It might be a sign of a community’s health that it needn’t scapegoat those who don’t fit in, while also creating a milieu where people can, if they wish to do so. Thompson may be right to believe that one feels the need to be part of the jigsaw, but equally, this should also be an individual’s desire, and not only a societal demand. If it becomes chiefly the latter, with little interest or respect for the individual, it creates a bigoted milieu that cannot accept difference.
In the film, people know nothing about the outsider in their midst, but his purpose isn’t to be accepted but to be interpreted. Though El Valpairoso doesn’t say anything negative about the hermit, it is still an assumption too far for MacAlisdair, who says each to his own. Just before the conclusion, Callum says to the teacher, he spoke to the hermit but not in words. They sat near each other at a beachhead and said nothing. Callum reckons if he could only turn that silence into words someday, this would be poetry, but MacAlisdair disagrees, saying it would be unbearable. As he is downing a whisky and drowning in sorrow after his lover’s fiancé has returned, we should be wary of taking his words too seriously, but the filmmaker might agree that language has its limits. Just after this scene, Callum goes out to the hermit’s hut and finds him absent, perhaps having left permanently. He does find a guitar, however, the same type as the fiancé’s, and briefly strums it as he might be better finding music out of silence over language, in contrast to the ending of Smith’s ‘The Hermit’, with its final sentence, ‘In the beginning was the Word.’ Communities are best seen convivially as a combination of words, silence and music, and Alexander does justice to all three in adapting Smith’s work,  nd in having the advantage of cinema, which, after all, can combine all three.

© Tony McKibbin