George Mackay Brown

Product Information

In his work, Brown takes in Viking invasions, the reformation of the church, farming practices, the hazardous life of fisherman, the cycle of the seasons, all delivered with a human touch. The vivid characterisation ensures that however distant the past depicted in them, they are immediately approachable. Reviewing the author's collection A Time to Keep and Other Stories in The New York Times Book Review in 1987, Sheila Gordon wrote that in his "marvelous stories," the author "holds us in the same way the earliest storyteller held the group around the fire in an ancient cave."

According to Reino, “Two aspects of Brown’s personal convictions are important to keep in mind: his rejection of nineteenth-and twentieth-century concepts of progress and his personal belief that Scotland ... is a ‘Knox-ruined nation,’ that is destroyed by the Calvinist reformer John Knox.” Neil Roberts, in a Cambridge Quarterly assessment of Brown’s work, noted that the author was “interested in art, religion and ritual, their relations to each other and to the agricultural basis of civilisation. He is interested in the relation of pagan to Christian religion, and of the World of Christ to the word of the poet.”SOURCE: A review of Selected Poems, 1954–1992, in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 243, No. 40, September 30, 1996, p. 84. In the following review, the critic describes Brown as gifted in "sharpening one's interest in genuinely rustic activities."] SOURCE: A review of Beside the Ocean of Time, in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 241, No. 35, August 29, 1994, p. 63.

After leaving school, George worked in the Post Office until, aged just 20, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Recovery took him several years, but whilst he recuperated, George spent much of his time reading and writing. He discovered The Orkneyinga Saga during that time and in Saint Magnus, George found a fascinating figure. Magnus was a Viking Earl who had sacrificed himself to end a bitter civil war in Orkney. Brown's poetry and prose have been seen as characterised by "the absence of frills and decoration; the lean simplicity of description, colour, shape and action reduced to essentials, which heightens the reality of the thing observed," [90] while "his poems became informed by a unique voice that was his alone, controlled and dispassionate, which allowed every word to play its part in the narrative scheme of the unfolding poem." [91] Calling Brown a “portent,” Jo Grimond suggested in the Spectator that “there are not so many poets and some have only a little poetry in them. We should be thankful for Mr. Brown and grateful to Orkney that has fed him.” Considering Fishermen with Ploughs: A Poem Cycle to be “Brown’s most impressive poetic effort,” Reino described the work as “a sequence of obscurely connected lyrics based on island ‘history’ as the author reconceives it.” Massingham called the work “a task indeed ... which is vividly and quietly accomplished with an interesting range of verse-forms and a marvelous prose chorus at the end.” Dunn agreed, stating in Poetry Nation that “much of Brown’s best writing is to be found in Fishermen with Ploughs.” Massingham concluded that “all his work to date has been a persistent devotion, not because he is running in runic circles but digging, rooting deeper.” He haunts the town hotel, ‘perched on the high stool in the corner of the bar’, where he holds forth, reading from his history. He gives a compacted, but compelling version of the long and complex story of the islands. Skarf – his name derives from Old Norse, meaning ‘to cut and join’, a term still found in timber boat-building. His language is ambitious – ‘In all the confusions of anabasis, domination, settlement that followed …’. ‘Anabasis’, a military advance into the interior of a territory, and the title of an epic poem written by the French diplomat, ‘Saint-John Perse’ (Alexis Leger), published in 1930 by T. S. Eliot, in translation made by Eliot working with the author. Had George Brown read Anabasis? There are lines and passages in the French poem that come very close to his preoccupations – ‘great turf-burnings seen afar and these operations channelling the living waters on the mountain’. 5The second book was unusual in its genesis. Brown's writing and Gunnie Moberg's photographs have been published side-by-side before. But on this occasion, the poems were written in direct response to the photographs. The Swedish-born photographer, who has lived on Orkney for 20 years (and in Scotland for almost 30) was not asked to illustrate a text; the procedure was the other way around. A settled home, which he rarely left, a settled religion, which he loved – and a dram or two – were to sustain him and his writing till his death in Stromness on 13 April 1996. He wrote regularly for the local newspaper – lively articles and essays – produced several short story volumes (some say his best work), and novels, and of course the poems on which his reputation rests. Portrait of Orkney, photographs by Werner Forman, Hogarth, 1981, revised edition with photographs by Gunnie Moberg, drawings by Erlend Brown, J. Murray, 1989.

The Two Fiddlers (opera libretto; music by Davies; adaptation of story by Brown; produced in London, 1978), Boosey and Hawkes, 1978. In the following review, Andreae considers Brown's posthumously published Following a Lark and Orkney: Pictures and Poems.]

His short story Andrina was adapted and directed for BBC Scotland by Bill Forsyth; another individual who has never fitted easily into any mould. He left an indelible mark on Scotland