George Mackay Brown Criticism
George Mackay Brown (1921-1996) was a celebrated Scottish literary figure whose works vividly depict the Orkney Islands' landscape and culture. As a poet, novelist, and short story writer, Brown integrated elements from Norse sagas, Scottish ballads, and Roman Catholic rituals, exploring themes of history, religion, and mysticism. His writing style is noted for its simple language and syntax, yet profound thematic depth, as seen in his exploration of "the riddle of fate and freedom" in works like Vinland, as discussed by Jonathan Coe.
Brown's poetry often evoked the elemental and timeless aspects of life in Orkney, focusing on its farmers and fishermen, while his narratives frequently addressed the adverse effects of modernity on traditional ways of life. His notable works include The Wreck of the Archangel, praised as "pure and unadulterated" poetry by Glyn Maxwell, and Beside the Ocean of Time, which captures the Orkney experience through a young dreamer's adventures.
Brown's titles often traverse a blend of secular and sacred themes, marked by rich, historical narratives and intimate portrayals of Orcadian life. His contributions to literature have been lauded for their portrayal of Orkney as "a microcosm of all the world," earning him the designation as a "great poet of place" by Ray Olson. Despite some criticism of his narrow focus, Brown's work is cherished for its depth and insight, chronicling the unique cultural heritage of the Orkney Islands.
Contents
- Principal Works
- Brown, George Mackay (Vol. 5)
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Brown, George Mackay (Vol. 100)
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Island Voices
(summary)
In the following review of The Wreck of the Archangel, Maxwell praises Brown as a creator of "pure and unadulterated" poetry.
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Access to Eden
(summary)
In the following review, Wawn remarks favorably on the imagery employed in Vinland.
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Sydney's Inferno
(summary)
In the following excerpt, Coe discusses Brown's exploration of "the riddle of fate and freedom" in Vinland. If you want to consider the struggle of the individual in the face of supernatural forces, to address what George Mackay Brown calls 'the riddle of fate and freedom', then you are best-off retreating into the distant past, as he has done in his fifth novel, Vinland. Here Brown has returned to the world of his beloved Orkneyinga Saga, that astonishing, bloody and darkly humorous chronicle of early Orkney which also provided material for his novel Magnus in 1973. This time, instead of drawing modern historical parallels, Brown has confined himself to putting fictional flesh onto historical bones, in a narrative which switches back and forth from the diplomatic warring between the rival Earls of Orkney and their sovereigns, the Kings of Norway, to detailed imaginative re-inventions of the lives of ordinary farmers, merchants and seamen forcing out a living from the islands.
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Northern Light
(summary)
In the following review, Roscoe compares Vinland and Beside the Ocean of Time. John Donne once said in a sermon that if your mind wanders to other places, then that is where you are; you are no longer in the present. Thorfinn, the hero in George Mackay Brown's new novel Beside the Ocean of Time, spends much of his childhood daydreaming. Through these dreams, Brown is able to dislocate time, mingling the past and the mythology of the Orkneys with the present, the 1920s and 1930s. Each dream is a tale that takes us into another time and world, from Vikings, broch builders and Robert the Bruce to press gangs and the legendary seal folk.
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Beside the Ocean of Time
(summary)
In the review below, the critic offers a mixed assessment of Beside the Ocean of Time. Brown's sweet coming-of-age novel about a fantasy-prone adolescent growing up in the Orkney Islands just before WWII offers some moving passages and fine, delicate prose but is sabotaged by a paucity of plot and narrative drive. Thorfinn Ragnarson is the daydreaming son of a tenant farmer, avoiding both work and school despite the best efforts of family, friends and neighbors. Instead, the boy dreams up elaborate historical fantasies. In a series of odd yet intriguing chapters, Brown transforms Thorfinn into a Viking traveler, a freedom-fighter for Bonnie Prince Charlie and the colleague of a Falstaffian knight who participates in the Battle of Bannockburn. The author then hurls his protagonist into the future as Thor, who returns to the Orkneys as an adult and recalls his internment in a German POW camp, where he discovered his writing skills. Thor also reflects on the history of the islands, the links between dreaming and writing and the whims of fate. Brown's lyrical descriptions and gift for local color capture the flavor of the Orkneys (where he was born), but his thin and choppy story line undermines this otherwise worthwhile effort.
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The Wreck of the Archangel
(summary)
In the following review, the critic describes the poems in The Wreck of the Archangel as "stout fare." A poet of the Orkney Islands of northernmost Scotland, Brown is something of a relic. The stuff of these poems is stout fare: legends of the sea, fish and corn, crumbling kirks and stone jars full of ale. Elemental rewards are discovered in these provincial tales and evocations, as in the title poem, which opens the collection: "Then, under the lamentation of the great sea harp, / Frailty of splintering wood, scattered cries, / The Atlantic, full-blooded, plucking / And pealing on the vibrant crag." As clear images of historical and contemporary Orcadian life appear, so does the ripe intelligence of the collection; here is a real if pre-industrial culture, preserved by a skilled poet's fervent art in a variety of styles. A number of meditations and seasonal songs close the book with a sense of religious authenticity.
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The Wreck of the Archangel
(summary)
In the following review, Olson finds that Brown's poems "telescope the centuries." Although not old-fashioned, Brown's poetry frequently seems ancient. Brown recalls the earliest history of his homeland—Orkney is the first archipelago north of the Scottish mainland and boasts some of the oldest Stone Age buildings in the British Isles—in verses that advert to Norse Vikings, the Romans before them, and, yet earlier, the semilegendary Picts. He often writes the oldest kinds of poems in English: calendar poems, riddling or question-and-answer poems, bestiaries, songs about the saints and holy days, verses on the most elemental things—a whole suite of poems here is about stone—in which the normally voiceless subjects speak their thoughts. He also writes splendidly of the experiences of the farmers, fishers, sailors, and children who are the principal actors in the long human drama of Orkney (see especially "Rackwick: A Child's Scrapbook" and "The Horse Fair"). Brown's poems telescope the centuries, returning us to an archetypal northern Europe as lively as the modern American rat race but far more significant.
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Beside the Ocean of Time
(summary)
In the following review, Henry describes Brown's chronicling of island life in Beside the Ocean of Time. George Mackay Brown's Beside the Ocean of Time might have been subtitled 'A Writer's Life.' The novel recaps Brown's continuing preoccupations as expressed in his weekly columns in the Orkney Herald in the 1940s and 1950s and the Orcadian in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, and in nearly two dozen volumes of poetry, ten collections of short stories, and a handful of novels. This substantial body of work rarely looks beyond the islands for its material and has earned him the unofficial status of chronicler of the Orcadian experience. It also serves as a sequel to that earlier and anonymous chronicle of the islands, the Orkneyinga Saga. Just as the earlier saga draws deeply from the past to demonstrate an essential 'Orkney' experience validating its current chronicle, Beside the Ocean of Time further demonstrates this continuity by incorporating 800 years of Orkney history into a twentieth-century narrative on the life of Thorfinn Ragnarson.
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Orcadian Epiphanies
(summary)
In the following review, Crotty offers a mixed assessment of Winter Tales. The Orkney of George Mackay Brown's poems and fictions has always been an ideal glimpsed behind a contemporary island reality he finds unsavoury, if not quite so unsavoury as life on the mainland. Consumerist values infect even the furthest corners of his archipelago, threatening the harmony with elemental rhythms celebrated in each of the three dozen or so books he has published since 1954. The forces of modernity are connected in the author's mind with the Calvinist assault on 'wonderment'—a term few other writers would dare employ—so that the primitive becomes synonymous with the sacramental, and the imagined, ulterior Orkney of the writing takes on an aspect simultaneously pagan and Catholic.
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Winter Tales
(summary)
In the following review, the critic describes the stories of Winter Tales as "always luminous if sometimes lifeless." Noted Scottish poet, novelist, and playwright Brown celebrates the dark season of the year in the Orkney Islands with 18 always luminous if sometimes lifeless stories.
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Winter Tales
(summary)
In the following review, Olson finds the stories of Brown's Winter Tales as poetic as any of his verse. These 18 stories by Orkney poet Brown are as poetic as any of his verse; indeed, the shortest, especially 'Shell Story,' about the widows of lost fishermen tossing scraps to gulls, are prose poems, although in the manner of folktales rather than the meditation or wry jape usual for the form. Several stories are, like many Brown poems, calendars consisting of 12 monthly sections, always ending at Yuletide. They range in style from the 12 tiny impressions that add up to 'A Nativity Tale' to long character sketches, such as 'Ikey,' about a tinker (itinerant) boy who is a mascot to the stabler folk of the islands he tramps, and 'The Woodcarver,' a dourly comic look at a genuine folk artist. A few stories are sui generis, 'Lieutenant Bligh and Two Midshipmen' outstandingly so; read it to learn what historical fiction ought to sound like—an aural slice of its era, not modern speech dressed, as it were, in period drag. This collection, like the star associated with its season, shines with gentle brilliance.
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George Mackay Brown, 74, Dies; Poet Steeped in Orkneys Lore
(summary)
In the following obituary, Mel Gussow recaps the life and career of George Mackay Brown, highlighting his profound connection to the Orkney Islands, his exploration of Scottish history and Catholic mysticism in his work, and his contributions to poetry, novels, and short stories that vividly capture the spirit of his native Orkneys.
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Orkney
(summary)
In the following review, Andreae considers Brown's posthumously published Following a Lark and Orkney: Pictures and Poems.
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An Island World of Vastness: George Mackay Brown (1921–96)
(summary)
In the following tribute, Feeney explores Brown's career, noting Seamus Heaney's remark that Brown could "transform everything by passing it through the eye of the needle of Orkney."
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Selected Poems, 1954–1992
(summary)
In the following review, the critic describes Brown as gifted in "sharpening one's interest in genuinely rustic activities." Gathering the best-known work of one of the leading poets in the Scottish Literary renaissance, this volume displays Mackay Brown's gift for sharpening one's interest in genuinely rustic activities. In his world, a rough-hewn, remote island off the shore of Northern Scotland marked by anvils, spades and nets, stone kirks and bowls of ale, seasonal imagery and the lusciousness of agrarian life are explored with vigor and depth. Mackay Brown conjures the potent goodness of the pure, unsmogged world, and he allows the old, solid things of the earth to commerce freely with the world of song, and with the dance of English speech. Some of the poems are even directly religious, such as "Daffodils," which eulogizes three women who stayed at the base of Christ's cross while he died. Mackay Brown's assertive, beautiful poems make this a collection worth having.
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Following a Lark and Selected Poems, 1954–1992
(summary)
In the review below, Olson praises Brown as 'one of the great contemporary poets of place.' He reflects on Brown's life in Orkney and how it influenced his poetry, highlighting the modern vocabulary, sharp imagery, and the blending of history with personal experience in his works.
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Island Voices
(summary)
- Further Reading