Where the World Ends

"There again, like the kites, Where the World Ends was based on something that I could really not research at all because there was so little written about it. That’s the appeal of coming across something like that. Everybody’s written about Marie Antoinette or Mary, Queen of Scots – it’s never appealed to me to go somewhere that everybody else has written about. But finding this tiny, couple of sentences about boys marooned on a sea stack – and nobody went to get them back – just started me thinking. Whatever did they suppose had happened? The possibilities could have been anything from the sublime to the unthinkable. The very last woman who had lived on St. Kilda died about the time I was writing the book. So it was rather a strange experience really – writing about a community that no longer exists. Yet, there’s a huge public fascination in the place, which I didn’t realise until the book came out. The Scots in particular are just obsessed with the whole idea of St. Kilda. I think it’s the remoteness of the place. The fantastically primitive life that those fowlers must have led when they were so isolated and relied so completely on the birds. I was going to do a kind of Lord of the Flies , but with a positive twist, based on their religious ideals. The people of St Kilda, though very superstitious, were devout Christians. I thought, “Well, what if they set up this perfect utopian society?” But it didn’t work. It didn’t work because there wasn’t a villain. You need opposition. You can’t have light without dark and so the story turned out entirely differently. Always a good sign, I think, with a book. The book wrote itself."