The Secret of Roan Inish (1994)

directed by John Sayles

Emma Riehle Bohmann

Once upon a time, shortly after the end of the Second World War, a young girl named Fiona was sent to live with her grandparents on the coast of Ireland. There, she discovered the secret of her family’s island, where three generations once lived together but abandoned several years before, and the truth of what happened to her baby brother Jamie, who disappeared at sea during the evacuation of the island.

The Secret of Roan Inish is, on the surface, about Fiona, and her brother, and the island—Roan Inish—and the pull it has on the members of the family who own it, the way it calls to them even when they no longer live there.

But The Secret of Roan Inish is actually about the power of stories. It’s about what happens when you sit by the fire—or by the fish cleaning table behind an old Irish grocery store, as the case may be—and give yourself over to the story someone is telling you. When you close your eyes and let yourself see what that person is describing—the waves crashing against the rock, the seal dragging itself out of the water, the cradle floating atop the sea, growing smaller and smaller as the wind picks up around it.

It seems to me that we don’t tell stories the way we used to, which is to say: fully, completely. We read books, listen to audiobooks, and absorb television and movies, so it’s not as if stories are absent from our lives. But there’s a difference, I think, between those acts which, at their core, are solitary, and the act of listening to a person weave a tale.

“What happened?” Fiona asks her grandfather, of her brother Jamie’s disappearance. “I was already on the ship.”

“Ah, Fiona,” he says, and he scoots closer to her, and he gives her not a single sentence—his cradle was picked up off the beach by the waves and drifted out to sea—but a full story: the ship, waiting in the bay. The family, loading the last of their possessions from the homes that had kept them safe for centuries. The cradle, sitting on the beach. The waves, creeping closer. The father and brother, carrying furniture through the doorway. The gulls, suddenly diving at them, wings flapping in their faces, the screeching in their ears, the way the men were forced to duck, to hold their arms over their heads to protect against the barrage. And then: the cradle, bobbing gently on the waves, drifting away from the shore. The dash to the beach, the shouts, the cries, dragging the boat into the water, gripping the oars, pulling, straining against the waves, the cradle always just out of reach, the sky growing darker as the storm approaches, until there’s nothing but black waves and black skies and a single rowboat, searching.

*

As writers, as readers, we talk about the suspension of disbelief. It’s a necessary ingredient for any story: the willingness of the audience to set aside reality, set aside their questions and accept that what you tell them is true, even when they know that not to be the case. It’s why we can be absorbed by tales of wizards and magic and dragons, by stories of circumstances and coincidence that stretch the imagination. It’s why movies like Roan Inish succeed. Because we want to let go, to give in to the story.

*

A good story can catch us off guard. I first saw The Secret of Roan Inish when I was young, maybe seven or eight, the same age as Fiona. I’m not sure what it was about the film exactly that drew me to it, but for months afterwards, I went around telling people it was my favorite movie. No one had seen it; no one had even heard of it. I suspect nothing much has changed there since then.

But I was a child who loved stories. I told stories, I wrote stories, I dreamed in stories. That, too, hasn’t changed. And so I think that what drew me to Roan Inish then is the same thing that drew me to it now, at 33, when I rewatched it: stories. I wasn’t expecting to be so taken with the film this time around. I wasn’t expecting to still be thinking of it weeks later. But, as all good stories do, it dug itself into me and latched on, a stinger embedded beneath my skin.

The stories told to Fiona during the movie strain credibility: a shipwrecked boy washed to shore during a storm, nearly dead, and revived when he is tied to a cow; a cradle washed out to sea; a selkie—a woman in a seal’s skin—captured by a man and kept from her ocean home. Fiona must decide for herself which are true and which are tales.

“That’s just stories,” she tells her cousin when he says people talk of seeing Jamie still riding the waves in his cradle, master of his own ship.

“Some stories is true, though,” he responds, to which she has no answer.

*

When Fiona first sees her brother Jamie on the island, he’s in a field picking flowers. She calls to him and he flees, running down to the cliff side to his cradle. He climbs into it and sails off on the waves, accompanied by two seals. Later, she peers through the window of one of the dilapidated houses on the island and spies him sharing a meal—a tea party, really—with a seal. Again, he runs when he sees her, the seal flopping behind him. It knocks Fiona over as it passes her, and she lands hard in the sand.

“The seals, is it?” her grandmother says when Fiona tells her who has been caring for Jamie all these years. She storms off, and you expect her to be angry with Fiona for telling stories, but she’s not. She’s packing a bag to return to the island and collect her long-lost grandson. She believes, and this belief makes all the difference.

*

When I was young, I wanted so badly to believe in the many stories I encountered throughout the day. I read books voraciously, and longed for their tales to be true. I yearned to live in a world of magic, where witches and dragons and talking animals roamed the forests, where spirits followed us through our days, where the right incantation could bring forth any number of wonders. At times, it seemed, I lived a parallel existence to my real life, for even as I went to school, practiced the piano, packed my lunch, cleaned my room, I was narrating an alternate story, one in which I was, of course, the hero, gifted with magic, with special abilities, tasked with protecting the ones I loved, with saving the world.

Believing isn’t always enough, of course, and eventually I grew out of my fantasy, but it remains so easy for me to slip into a story, to give myself over to another world. I was surprised, upon rewatching the film, how easy it was for me to do that with Roan Inish, but I think sometimes stories remain with you, even when you think you’ve forgotten them. Maybe that’s why I selected this obscure, only-hazily-remembered film to write about in the first place.

*

My younger sister often grew exasperated with me when we were growing up. The two of us would shut ourselves up in her bedroom and play games. I was always drawn to war, to disaster. We were Revolutionary War spies, we were Jews escaping the Nazis. Even when we played with toys—paper dolls, Playmobil, stuffed animals—disaster inevitably struck: tornados, floods, earthquakes. “Why can’t we ever play normal games, where nothing bad happens?” she asked me once, and I reluctantly agreed to try—only to make a hurricane strike less than ten minutes later, uprooting the houses we’d made for our plastic puppies out of pop boxes and throwing the imaginary world into disarray.

For me, disaster was the story. War was the plot. Without them, I was uninterested.

I’ve learned, since then, to accept the smaller stories, the internal struggles. I’ve learned that, for me, there’s no plot without character, that a challenge can be against oneself, against something unseen. There’s more to life than war and disaster and calamity. I’ve learned about nuance, and how it manifests in stories.

I think that’s part of what drew me to The Secret of Roan Inish this time around: the quiet in the story. There’s tragedy and loss and heartache and struggle—the missing child, the deceased mother, the lost home—but the quiet fortitude of the characters is part of what drew me to them. It was Fiona herself, more than the disasters she navigated, that sucked me in.

*

Once upon a time, there was a young girl named Fiona who listened to the stories her grandfather told, her cousin told, strangers in the town told, and she believed them. Once upon a time, she told her own story—a story of a brother lost, and then found—and her grandmother believed her. Once upon a time, a family moved back to their island, the island of Roan Inish, and were together, and home.

Once upon a time, a different young girl watched a movie and fell in love. She grew up and forgot about this movie for many years until one day her friend asked her to write about a film, and it suddenly seemed that she could only choose this one. Once upon a time, that same young girl, who was now a grown woman, watched that same movie and once again fell in love.

*

The Secret of Roan Inish is not a life-changing film. I’m not recommending anyone rush out and watch it, and not just because I’m not sure how you would, given how difficult it was for me to locate a copy. But I do think there’s something very powerful about finding that thing you loved as a child and returning to it as an adult. About reflecting on what it meant to you then, and what it means to you now, and why. About who you were then, and who you are now, and why.

As a child, I loved stories. As an adult, I love stories. So much about me has changed, but that? That has remained constant.

Emma Riehle Bohmann lives in Minneapolis, where she reads, writes, runs, and tries to trick herself into loving winter. She is currently working on a novel.