Jordan, Humphrey This Island Demands
Possessing a rousing title worthy of Noël Coward at his most patriotic, Jordan’s engrossing novel today presents an interesting look back to then-contemporary British attitudes during the earliest days of World War 2. The novel opens in Aug. 1939 aboard the fictitious 4,200 ton meat freighter PARANA in the Liverpool - River Plate service as her new master, Captain Richard Pell takes command. The PARANA’s early World War 2 voyages are uneventful, and perhaps a year into the conflict she is routed to Australia. Her return voyage to England from Australia is another story. She carries not only nine rather difficult passengers (a microcosm of Great Britain, it seems, and certainly an unflattering look at the English class system), but also an alcoholic mate. Early on in the Indian Ocean the ship suffers a near fatal encounter with a German surface raider which leaves the PARANA crippled and drifting without power. Remarkably, an ocean current carries the disabled vessel to an islet in the unpopulated Amirante Islands where, during a six-month stay there, the ship’s ever resourceful Captain and crew make the seemingly miraculous repairs necessary to sail the ship to Durban, South Africa. A happy ending to the novel, though, is dashed when, just days from England, the ship is torpedoed and over half her passengers and crew die in the ensuing disaster.
At the time of its late 1941 publication This Island Demands received only faint praise from The Times Literary Supplement (Dec. 13, 1941), which noted, in part:
“Mr. Humfrey Jordan knows what he is doing. His characterization, serviceable in its way, is not specially profound and indeed is inclined to be sketchy. The narrative construction, too, is somewhat ragged: there is a lack of discrimination in the piling up of circumstantial detail. But the feeling is direct and unforced, the dramatic values are sound, and the war-time routine of merchantmen and their crews is pictured vividly enough.”
Also of interest are a series of evocative, pen-and-ink drawings by the illustrator Bip Pares which enliven chapter headings.