The saga of a heroic life

GEORGE MACKAY BROWN, poet and fiction writer, died in his native Orkney on April 13th. 1996. It had been known for some time that this most reticent of men had completed an autobiography in the 1980s but embargoed its publication until after his death. This fuelled rumour and, in certain Scottish literary circles, created apprehension.

If the anticipation was entertaining, the revelations are merely enlightening. His "drunk and mercifully incapable" night in Edinburgh's police cells in 1961 is funny but disappointingly discreet about his companions on the night. The lifelong bachelor was "shaken with sweet delight" in the presence of a fellow schoolboy, for one adolescent summer. During his six student years in Edinburgh his "Muse" was one Stella Cartwright; and indeed this book does close in 1985, the year of her death. She was also, however, a somewhat unlikely "figure of adoration" for a number of poets and other drinking companions at that time.

A brief notation, enlarged by several liquid conversations in Orkney over the past decade, makes one note with affection the mention of a Newcastle girl "met in a sanatorium in the 40s". "She has always been the sole recognisable person in my dreams.

It was, however, the drink itself that got the author's life long devotion. It both created and eased the urge to communicate. In a paradoxically clearheaded way Brown tells of a childhood plagued with TB, alleviated by maternal cosseting, and then in adulthood accelerated into creativity by alcohol.

What his original literary mentor, the staid fellow Orkadian, poet/translator Edwin Muir, would think of this makes the hand shake in shared bemusement with Brown himself.

George Mackay Brown was born in 1921 into a large Presbyterian family, the last of five brothers and a sister. His father, John Brown, was both tailor and postman. His mother, a Mackay from a Gaelicspeaking community on the mainland, provided the secure pulse for his erratic heartbeat. He adopted her name as a writer and after his father's death in 1940 lived with her until her death in 1967. Home was Stromness, on the main island of the Orkneys: Hamnavoe in the Norse, meaning "haven within the bay"; this was the Greenvoe of his fictions. In 1961 he "converted to the light within" Catholicism. The impetus came from his research into the "inscapes" of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

If drink released his circumlocutions it was his geographical location that framed his literature. The imperatives of island rhythms to his writing is caught in the opening sentences of this slim but emotionally stout hearted memoir:

"The Orkney islands lie to the north of Scotland, sundered by what is often a stormy piece of water, the Pentland Firth. The tides huddle herdslong - the Atlantic pouring into the North Sea, and North Sea into Atlantic four times a day. If there are contrary winds, tremendous seas can build up.

Encapsulated in that are the measures articulating his imagination. His poems, usually in seven line stanzas, shift between the instant and the image. The stories are islands, epiphanies. The novels, including Beside the Ocean of Time (1994), a short semi autobiographical piece which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, are informed by close reading of Rognvald's 12th century Orkaeyiaga Saga. Historical intrigues, such as that between cousins Hakon and Magnus, populate an imaginary world where fishermen work with ploughs, and war is portrayed as familial fetid. The cruelties of Viking invaders are paralleled with the barbarism of Nazi concentration camps. The nobility of Magnus on the scaffold echoes the self sacrifice of mothers and sisters in a patriarchal world.

If this book is short on gossip it is generous in allowing us into the author's mind. Here he sifts insular flotsam and finds universal flux: climatic, eroding, evolving, as measured as the tides.

This is not a revealing book but an illuminating one: candlelight stubbornly alive in the centre of a thunderstorm.