I NEVER much liked The Good Life. Not because it put Felicity Kendal in wellingtons (as an image, that’s way up there) but because it spawned a whole genre of real-life, off-grid comedy memoir. Hapless townies try to milk the billy goat and don’t know that hens have eggs even without the cockerel’s attention. Moments of happiness (the first lamb!) and moments of tragedy (death of same). A desperate urge to convince the reader that it’s all fun fun fun and that a diet of kale and stringy rooster meat is infinitely preferable to restaurant fare.

Above all, that very dangerous word “idyll”, which, like “effortless” grace on the pommel horse or beam, usually conceals hours of painful work and injury. As we like to say here, we never saw half as many rats when we were still in the rat race.

At first glance, Island On The Edge looks set to tick the clichés one by one. Englishwoman on holiday in Scotland sees house ad. Doesn’t know where Soay is. Curiously drawn, though. Buys, more or less unresearched. Gives up job in advertising and moves north. Finds it harder than expected, but falls in love – in more ways than one – and settles down happily, albeit with a warning note.

To sum up Anne Cholawo’s narrative like that would be to do it and her a serious disservice. This is a rather subtle book, all the more convincing for its occasional naiveties and its draughtswoman’s plainness of observation. We know something of Soay from Gavin Maxwell’s Harpoon At A Venture. His shark-processing factory rusts just across the island from Cholawo’s home. And we have a strong sense of island life from Frank Fraser Darling and others. But as she insists, this is her own story, told at her own pace.

The small community that greets her on landing is led by Tex and Jeanne Geddes, he a former Maxwell employee and thus full of ambiguous life, or ambiguously larger than it; she a classic island helpmeet, warm and strong.

Anne settles in and even gets her precious upright piano helicoptered over, thanks to the Marines. The words “learning curve” don’t appear, and “self-sufficiency” only rears its ugly head, and in due context, in chapter 26. Instead, she explains how she learns to cope with irregular mail, store-cupboard food, picking winkles for much-needed cash, stripping boat engines and helping with the sheep chase.

It’s vigorous, outdoorsy stuff, propped atop a Luton childhood demarcated by motorway embankments, sodium lights and neighbourhood values, a warm and enclosed upbringing that contrasts with the deliberately unemotional adult voice. The plainness of the writing is exemplary. There are a couple of heart-stopping sunsets, but mostly we get to know Anne through tiny glimpses and tone-changes. There is a faint air of sexual threat around the late Tex and his entourage, never openly stated, but shaded in with a novelist’s touch. There is an extraordinary darkling moment when Anne feels the ground shake and hears a low thunder and steps behind a gable only to be narrowly missed by a stampede of Highland ponies. There is the moment she navigates blind to Skye through a snowstorm, only to find that fishermen have watched her on radar. And there is the constant question why, umpteen chapters in, Anne Pacey is still not Anne Cholawo. We know, of course, that the bearded figure who arrives with the Marines and who far too quickly asks her age and announces that he is happily married is going to appear again, and in a leading role. Robert Cholawo (you say it “holavo”, I think) is a benign presence throughout the book. You know he’s thinking about her, even if she doesn’t know it yet.

She doesn’t make a show of naivety. It also comes through in tiny verbal lapses, as when she mixes up sulphur dioxide (which smells) and carbon monoxide (which doesn’t), or when she refers, delightfully, to installing a “hot water gas geezer”.

When Anne arrives on Soay in 1989-1990, there were 17 inhabitants. Today, or at time of writing, there are three. Her final chapter looks back to Maxwell’s bleak foretelling of decline and depopulation in the islands, but she asks some deeper questions that go beyond the usual political footballs (ferry services – not that there’s one to Soay – mails, supplies and services, medical cover). If, she asks, people can’t with goodwill and effort inhabit a mostly benign little island just a spit off the coast of a much larger one that is now connected to the mainland, all this in a world joined up by wires, webs and clouds, how can we hope to keep living in the world at all?