Post Road Magazine, Issue #25, Fall/Winter 2013
I bought George Mackay Brown’s novel Beside the Ocean of Time in a newsagent/bookstore/souvenir shop on Scotland’s Isle of Lewis because I needed something to read on the ferry back to the mainland. This was spring 1998, and while Brown’s name was already familiar through cultural osmosis I’d never read him before. Since then I’ve read all of his fiction, most of it multiple times, and much of his poetry and non-fiction, too. It’s likely I’ve reread him more than any other author, and I’ve even read Maggie Ferguson’s excellent biography twice-and-a-half despite my usual lack of interest in reading about writers’ lives.
In part, it’s the islands. I’ve long had a readerly inclination toward islands and my own first failed attempt at a novel was set on an imaginary bit of land off New England (and the resulting manuscript deserved to be banished to one). The vast majority of Brown’s poetry and prose is set among the islands of Orkney, along rocky shorelines and salt-scoured village streets. It’s a landscape he knew well, one he hardly left apart from periods on the mainland of Scotland for periods of education and recuperation from tuberculosis. His is the landscape I escape to in daydreams when I need to get away from wherever I am, because the cold North Atlantic with its loud wind and damp air and rare but brilliant breakthroughs of sunlight has always felt like a natural fit and Brown’s books are how I get there. I suppose I should call him a sentimental favorite, with my enthusiasm being a bit less than critical, though I have my favorites among his vast oeuvre, and my least favorites, and I’m not blind to his sentimentality or his lapses into being a bit of a scold against modernity and technology and the trappings of “progress” — which are, I’ll admit, bugaboos of my own writing, too.
I admire Brown for finding his place, and for insisting that place was worth staying in despite what it cost him in access to the spheres of publishing and literary culture and fame. And for insisting on writing about that place, his islands, despite how unfashionable they may have been. None of which would matter a whit if the writing wasn’t so rich, and if his sentimentality and nostalgia weren’t complicated. Consider “Tithonus,” a story in his collection Hawkfall, in which the Laird of a declining island laments,
It is an island dedicated to extinction. I can never imagine young people coming back to these uncultivated fields and eyeless ruins. Soon now, I know, the place will finally be abandoned to gulls and crows and rabbits. When first I came to Torsay fifty years ago, summoned from London by my grand-uncle’s executor, I could still read the heraldry and the Latin motto over the great Hall door. There is a vague shape on the sandstone lintel now; otherwise it is indecipherable. All that style and history and romance have melted back into the stone.
Yes, “his” tenants are abandoning their traditional homes and lifeways, but the occupying mark of the Laird’s own Latin-scratched, Londonate presence is also erased as the island recreates (if not quite returns to) an earlier, more hopeful state. Brown twists our nostalgia like clothes left to dry in unpredictable Orcadian wind until we wonder what, exactly, we are nostalgic for. His voice timeless and lyrical, almost incantatory at times, yet idiosyncratically modern as well.
Brown’s islands aren’t outliers but crucial nodes, farflung from what we might think of the world’s “important” places — as was the writer himself — yet in his stories and poems they become meshed in histories ancient and modern, proving grounds for religion and politics and economics. There’s the mysterious military occupation of Greenvoe in which a remote village is forced to relocate by the push of distant nation states. And there’s Magnus, a narrative of the life and death of a twelfth century Earl-cum-Saint, betrayed and murdered by those with designs on his power, that leaps from ancient Orkney to a World War II concentration camp with unbound human cruelty the connecting thread. No place, and no possibility, is ever so far from us as we might like to think, even on an island in the middle of nowhere.
There’s also Brown’s poem “Hamnavoe,” trailing his postman father on his daily rounds through the village, with this stanza about passing the pub:
In the Arctic Whaler three blue elbows fell,
Regular as waves, from beards spumy with porter,
Till the amber day ebbed out
To its black dregs.
These are elbows that have gone to sea, have seen the world and returned, rather than staying put their whole lives, and the glasses they hoist are ringed with both knowledge and loss, achievement and failure. What appeals to me so much in Brown are these critical moments, these realizations that staying put is an option but not a gentle, romantic one: yes, we can go our own way, carve our own course through sea or stone, but every choice leaves “its black dregs.” His insistence on ploughing the same literary fields all his life — on “martyring himself to modernity,” as Seamus Heaney has said — echoes the decisions many of his characters make to stay or to leave or to return to those islands, and to face the consequences of those decisions. His repetitions of setting and seasons and characters and themes echo the rhythms and cycles of the islands themselves, and his catalogue of stories and poems risk blurring into one another though their similarities but to the attentive eye, to the long-term reader, the variations are as vast as life on a small island.
As a writer, I find Brown endlessly inspiring and reassuring, a model of the value of trusting your own instincts and unfashionable leanings. As a reader, the ceaseless tide of his legacy is a constant source of renewal and a reminder that nothing is as simple as either/or and ancient/modern: every character, every life, every decision — every word — is as tightly woven into the world and its history and future as Brown was woven into his islands, and as tightly as he’s woven me into his world.