Jean-Paul Kauffmann's account of a visit to the Kerguelen Islands, the most remote of the French Southern and Antarctic Lands, is a fine work of philosophical escapism. He is an expert on the awful charm of oblivion. Shiite Muslims took him hostage in Beirut and kept him chained in solitary confinement for three years. Kauffman is a resourceful contemplative with sufficient strength of character and subtlety of imagination to make the most of very little. And he is an unsentimental, poetic writer, as Patricia Clancy demonstrates in her translation of his French. The Kerguelen Islands comprise a volcanic archipelago measuring about 125 miles from north to south, at the southernmost extremity of the Indian Ocean, some 3,000 miles south-west of Australia. The islands have been there for 30 million years, but, far from customary shipping lanes, they were not sighted until February 12th, 1772. Yves-Joseph de Kerguelen was so unfavourably impressed by what he saw in bad weather that he claimed the territory for France without going ashore. Louis XV promoted him to the rank of captain and awarded him the Order of Saint Louis for his discovery, and sent him back for a closer look. After that confirmatory second voyage, however, Kerguelen was court-martialed for "having illicitly taken a girl on board and having lived with her and other female passengers in a scandalous manner". In spite of the disgrace (or in recognition of it?), the French have always called the islands by his name. Captain James Cook landed there and named them the Desolation Islands. According to Kauffmann, they really are desolate, but Captain Cook was British, so his apt description was not officially recognised.
Kauffman tells, not very interestingly, of the few men he encountered in the tiny capital, Port-auxFrancais, which scientists of various disciplines use as a base for exploration and research. Backed up by technicians under a civilian administrator, they spend a summer or a whole year there, rarely longer. They must have better maps than the one with which Kauffmann provides his readers: it is printed on two pages that do not quite join in the middle, so that Irish Bay, for example, becomes Iris ay. There is one other trace of the far-flung Irish diaspora: the topmost peak, an elevation of 6,000 feet, is called Mount Ross (Moun Ross). But Irishness is not within the author's purview.
Planes cannot land at Kerguelen and a small ship makes the rough, seven-day passage from Reunion, off Madagascar, to the islands only two or three times a year. The book's superior distinction may be appreciated most intensely in Kauffmann's analysis of the sense of isolation in that bleak place of high winds and deep silences, as anomalously exciting as loneliness in a monastic cell. The great Arc of Kerguelen, a geological phenomenon he had waited 40 years to see, was already a ruin before he got there. He concludes that Kerguelen might serve best as a sort of Noah's Ark in which to avoid the ravages of nuclear war.
Patrick Skene Catling is an author and critic
The Arch of Kerguelen: Voyage to the Islands of Desolation, by Jean-Paul Kauffmann, is available through Internet bookstores