[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.

Thorfinn Ragnarson is known on his island of Norday as a "lazy idle useless boy". But his dreams tell us that he is a storyteller, the ancient bard; he has the "gift of language". His island world is abruptly destroyed when the government decides to build a military aerodrome on it. Crofters are served with notice to vacate land that has run through families for generations; crops are flattened by Nissen huts and concrete.

We next come upon Thorfinn in the role of Private Ragnarson, a prisoner of war. He is now writing in earnest. After the war Thorfinn spends several years in Edinburgh, becoming a successful writer, his books based on his childhood dreams. Yet he is dissatisfied with his work, and realising that he needs quiet and solitude to develop his writing, he returns to Norday.

Brown was born on Orkney in 1921 and still lives there. Those familiar with his work will recognise many of the themes that have always fascinated him, but it is the last chapter of this book that cannot help but bring its author into the foreground. The success of one of Thorfinn's novels echoes the success of Brown's Greenvoe, which also focused on the island community destroyed by modern technology. Thorfinn sadly comments that his one successful work was based on the life of an Orkney islander and "who nowadays is interested in the life of a poor islander?" Yet this is precisely what Brown's success is based on. But even while we jump to his defence, we know that it is really Brown's unique way of representing such lives that continually draws readers back to his work.

The title Beside the Ocean of Time links this book with Brown's last novel Vinland. In Vinland, the protagonist dwells at the end on an imaginary ship, a ship that will carry him on his final voyage: death. The voyage in this new work is one of life; a man's life is a voyage over the ocean of time.

Brown's hand has, I feel, been lighter, more subtle in his previous work. Although the language is as usual terse and austere, there are the odd times when he seems to be labouring his point. In his earlier short stories, one felt that the fire in the croft was life and must never go out. You did not need to be told.

The soul-searching of Thorfinn raises the question of whether Brown is dissatisfied with his own achievements. Thorfinn sees himself in search of the "grail of poetry"; he wants to "dredge something rich and strange" out of the mythology of the islands. In the end he appears to admit defeat. The prose poem he wants to write will be, for him at least, unattainable. No one could say that Brown himself has not been close to the "mythical past" of the Orkneys; he is in fact a master of this kind of writing, and his poems and stories brilliantly evoke the "rich and strange" of Orkney history.