Peter Conrad’s new book, Islands: A trip through time and space, takes a different line. He too was born on an island that didn’t suit him. In Tasmania, where he spent his early years, he felt like a castaway. It was the wrong place for him. After brilliant success as a university student, he moved to England, and on that larger island he was reborn. Standing on Waterloo Bridge, he had his moment of illumination: this was where he was meant to be. Somehow Shakespeare’s ‘sceptred isle’ was exempt from the charge of insularity. Yet, as his meditation on the nature and meaning of islands makes clear, the move from the edge to the centre did not resolve Conrad’s sense of displacement: ‘I have always felt beached inside my own body, marooned in my head.’ Not for him the consolation of John Donne’s ‘No man is an island ...’ We are all fragmented, none more so than Tasmanians.

The map of that first island shapes itself nightmarishly in Conrad’s imagination. For his Tasmania the process of separation is murderous. ‘Like a body torn apart, the peninsulas south of Hobart trail off into arms, then tenuous fingers … the fragmentary limbs and digits crumble into a flailing ocean.’ Conrad invokes Marcus Clarke’s image of the island’s outline: ‘like a biscuit gnawed by rats.’ He thinks of Tasmania as a burial site. Elsewhere, this perception of the particular becomes general: ‘islands are dead ends, cemeteries.’ Islands is not an autobiography – Conrad has written about his early years in the dismally titled memoir Down Home (1998) – but it is shaped by his belief that escape from his birthplace at the age of twenty was a necessary, saving act. Conrad is well known for the astonishing range and sustained distinction of his scholarly writings. He won his place at Oxford, which became his permanent base, as an antipodean wunderkind in 1968. From James McAuley, who taught the young Conrad at the University of Tasmania, to Iris Murdoch and John Bayley who welcomed him as an Oxford undergraduate, he has never lacked acclaim.

Conrad does not have the instant public recognition given to those more entrepreneurial expatriates Clive James, Germaine Greer, Barry Humphries, and Robert Hughes, but after twenty-one books, countless essays, reviews, public lectures and visiting professorships, he is a major figure within and beyond the British scholarly world. From his first book, The Victorian Treasure-House (1973), an interwoven study of nineteenth-century fiction, painting and architecture, he has taken unpredictable new directions to The Hitchcock Murders (2001) and a study of Orson Welles (2003). His reviews can be ferocious. Clive James’s Cultural Amnesia was a recent exercise in demolition.

Islands is a return, even a regression, to the preoccupations of Down Home, and of Conrad’s 2004 Boyer lectures, in which an affable nod to some aspects of Australian culture went with a renewed shudder at the Tasmanian life he left behind. Conrad’s voyage takes him through the centuries with Homer’s Odysseus, to Marvell’s poem ‘Bermudas’, to the Hollywood musical On an Island with You, which may have caught his attention because it was made in 1948, the year he was born. Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse suggests different ways to annihilation: whether by staying behind or taking the boat, ‘we perished, each alone’. Other islands offer an escape, an illusory paradise, a place in which courage and ingenuity are tested and social theories acted out, or a living hell.

Most of the island stories end with a return to the mainland, as in Robinson Crusoe, or a compromise, as in The Swiss Family Robinson, in which some family members choose to stay in the new world they have made habitable with their well-informed and thrifty improvisations. Some end in death, as in Lawrence’s story, to which Conrad, surprisingly, gives only one sentence.

Barrie’s Peter Pan exemplifies the island as a fantasy of perpetual childhood. In The Island of Doctor Moreau, H.G. Wells enacts a crazy dream of surgically created amalgams of humans and animals. Moreau’s experiments fail. So, too, do nearly all the island adventures, whether imagined by poets and novelists, or annexed by rich unhappy people such as Marlon Brando, who chose an atoll near Tahiti, with tragic results. Today, Conrad observes, no film star’s portfolio is complete without an island. Mel Gibson and Leonardo di Caprio each have a small one to play with.

Conrad has always felt a longing for cities. Yet this book offers only a minimal endorsement of crowded places; their ‘erasure of personal identity’ is welcome, and the pressure of rush hour is something for which he ‘ought’ to be thankful. The closing words give small consolation: there must be islands, other worlds, else ‘how could we bear to live in this one?’ Like Mr Ramsay, who subverts the family outing in To the Lighthouse, Conrad doesn’t allow anyone to have a good time on an island, or anywhere else. That, of course, is his right as an author, under no obligation to play Pollyanna, but the pervasive sense of gloom makes you wonder if the voyage was worth making.

This elegantly written meditation is beautifully produced. With hard covers, good paper and witty little drawings to head each chapter, Conrad’s publishers have done him proud, although a niggardly index spoils the effect. Strangely, in a book which is text-based, with recurring references to the same work in different chapters, there are no entries for book titles or major characters. Prospero must be found by looking at the pages listed under Shakespeare; Gulliver’s Travels sought by way of Swift. G.B. Shaw is a notable omission: surely John Bull’s Other Island deserved a visit. Some obscure atolls are indexed, because they can be found on maps of the world, but the indexer bypasses Avalon, Laputa and Never Land. Yet these imagined places are central to the theme of humankind’s preoccupation with islands, whether as places of escape or confinement, fulfilment or endurance. And, indexed or not, Tasmania, the unforgiven island, is on every page.