[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.

"The Paraffin Lamp", one of the shortest of the eighteen pieces in Winter Tales, brings a moralizing satisfaction to its account of an ageing islander's grudging acceptance of electric light: "He said that was a very handy thing, the electric light. He could see by it to fill his old lamp, and trim the wick, and light it with a wisp of straw from the fire." There may be a paradigm here for Mackay Brown's cussedly conservative art. This is a collection not of short stories—too literary a term—but of tales, tales born of innumerable northern winters when the harshness of the struggle for subsistence was relieved only by the exchange of narratives round the fire. Mackay Brown's "ballads in prose" derive from the oral traditions of Orkney; they do not, however, extend them. They are written fictions addressed less to a northern community—as eager as any in Glasgow or London for electronic entertainment in the evenings—than to a sophisticated metropolitan readership which needs to be reassured that ancient patterns of living persist at the latter end of the world. (The representatives of that readership put Beside the Ocean of Time on last year's Booker short-list.)

An encounter between the old Orcadian ways and the more powerful surrounding world lies at the heart of most of these tales (only "The Road to Emmaus", an over-explicit updating of the New Testament in the manner of school-magazine fiction, makes no reference to the islands). The precision and lucidity of Mackay Brown's style—or styles; he varies his idiom according to temporal setting—gives his writing more interest than its predictable and even static vision promises. Thus the diary-narrative of the protagonist's education in simplicity in "The Laird's Son" is enlivened by some finely realized detail of eighteenth-century Edinburgh. "Lieutenant Bligh and Two Midshipmen" elaborately fictionalizes the meeting, in 1780, in Stromness (always Hamnavoe in Mackay Brown's work), between Bligh and George Stewart, an Orkney man who was to end up on the wrong side of the Bounty mutiny and drown on his way home to face trial. Prompted by an authorial note external to the story itself, the reader's consciousness of the future course of the relationship between the two men lends the proceedings a genuine pathos. The pieces set in the Middle and Dark ages, where the antagonists are Norse crusaders and Spaniards, Celtic monks and Vikings, supply a validating historical context for the qualities of lyricism and simplicity which can seem mannered in some of the other stories.

The constantly shifting temporal focus underlines the permanence of Orkney in contrast to the fleeting human lives which replicate their patterns across the centuries. Mackay Brown's view of history is familiar from many of his earlier books, as is the maritime imagery he uses to render it. Remarkably, he can still make this imagery sound new-minted. In "Dancey", for instance, we were told that "Andrew Crag came home from the sea day after day and a wave of children broke about his knee".

For the Christian, the wave of time is steadied by the Incarnation: Christ's arrival on earth is the greatest of all winter tales. Story after story here makes reference to Christmas and the failure of Calvinistic Orcadians to celebrate it as their forebears did. Intimations of the eternal hover at the edges of island life, but though registered by the author's eye, they remain invisible to his characters. "A Boy's Calendar" ends with the report of a baby who survived the wreck of a ship called the Archangel to be brought up by crofters. "Since there was no way of knowing the child's name, they had called him Archie Angel." Another calendar story, "Ikey", concludes with a young tinker's breaking the window frame of a ruined inn to make kindling for a mother who has just given birth to a child in an adjacent byre.

Mackay Brown arranges his epiphanies with skill, but they can seem decorative and even sentimental to the secular reader. The other-worldly music of this fiction is haunting, certainly; it needs more of the ground bass of the contemporary to be fully convincing.