Dodecanese Islands

The Dodecanese Islands enter the novel as the destination of Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew’s ten-day island-hopping holiday in July 1992. Approached by ferry from Rhodes, they are first encountered as a vivid contrast to London: a granite island rising from exceptionally clear water, with pale houses clustered above its harbour. For Emma, reaching the islands makes travel feel newly expansive, rather than merely difficult or disappointing.

Setting and Arrival

On the second day of the holiday, Emma and Dexter travel aboard an ancient, rust-spotted ferry across the Aegean Sea, moving from Rhodes toward the smaller Dodecanese islands. The journey is slow and physical: the ferry chugs onward while they lie on deck, recovering from a taverna hangover, eating oranges, reading, and enjoying the silence between them. Their first night had been spent in Rhodes’s Old Town, where sugary cocktails served in hollowed-out pineapples had accompanied the novelty of being away together.

As the ferry nears land, Emma sees a blue-grey granite mass above the sea and a harbour town whose houses appear the colour of coconut ice. The island initially seems almost unpopulated, its buildings gathered in a small cluster above the water. On disembarking, the couple meet the practical commotion of travel: backpackers and casual travellers hurry across the quay in search of accommodation. Dexter tells Emma to wait in a café while he finds somewhere for them to stay, turning their arrival into the first small task of the island-hopping journey.

The Holiday and Its Rules

The islands are the setting for a holiday shaped by an agreement between Emma and Dexter. On this second morning, the Rules of Engagement are still holding: the pair lie side by side on the ferry’s sun deck, sleeping off the previous night and sharing an easy quiet. Their holiday intimacy is expressed less through grand gestures than through the ease of reading, resting, and being together without needing to fill the silence.

The rules also make room for comic differences. Emma has insisted on a no-nudity clause, while Dexter has proposed a ban on Scrabble and Boggle, games he regards as tedious and humiliating. The rules give their companionship a deliberately negotiated shape, preserving closeness while marking out small boundaries. Against the unfamiliar landscape, these private terms lend the holiday its own routine.

Emma’s Experience of Travel

The island’s arrival matters especially because Emma’s earlier holidays have not offered the same sense of freedom. As a child, she spent two weeks each year in a caravan in Filey, fighting with her sister while her parents drank and watched the rain. At university, a camping trip in the Cairngorms with Tilly Killick became a joke that ended up simply being miserable. The islands therefore meet an expectation formed by years of cramped or disappointing travel—and overturn it.

Standing at the railing as the harbour comes into view, Emma begins to understand the appeal of going somewhere distant. She feels far from the launderette, the top deck of the night bus, and Tilly’s box room. London’s air had seemed like something to peer through; here, everything appears bright and sharply defined. Her happiness registers in small gestures: she laughs quietly at the island’s first appearance, reflexively says she looks terrible when Dexter photographs her, and calls the view all right while feeling happier than she can remember.

Narrative Significance

The Dodecanese make distance perceptible through the novel’s contrast between kinds of movement. The ferry carries Emma and Dexter out of the familiar urban routines that define Emma’s London life; its slow passage and the scramble ashore turn travel into a sequence of bodily, shared experiences rather than a change of scenery alone. For Emma, the island’s clarity is also a change in what travel can mean: earlier trips had meant confinement or discomfort, whereas this arrival opens onto pleasure and possibility.

That sense of escape is specific to the holiday and its moment. Elsewhere, Emma’s movement through North London on her bicycle ends in a fatal accident in heavy rain. The contrast does not make the islands a cause or an answer to that later event; instead, it sets the holiday’s unhurried ferry passage and radiant sea against the vulnerability of everyday urban travel. The two forms of movement give the island setting a distinct place in the story’s changing geography of freedom, intimacy, and risk.