Winter Tales by George Mackay Brown

the Guardian 4th november 2006

These stories by the “Bard of Orkney” were published as a collection for the first time in 1995, a year before his death. Although some were written 20 years earlier, a sense of relentless mortality informs every page. The islanders of Orkney are at ease with death, “the bride of silence”, and a fierce morality underpins the tales so that humility is rewarded and hubris is never allowed to go unpunished. Even a heretofore unassuming woodcarver must pay for a momentary lapse: his “drunken dream of gold … ended in fire and wreckage”. Assumptions are repeatedly overturned: a suspected miser is revealed to be an impoverished philanthropist after his death. This kind of perpetual subversion of expectation can, ultimately, appear formulaic. The islanders are suspicious of privilege, sophistication and technology, and their author seems to share these prejudices. In his foreword, he laments that “not many modern stories hold children from play, and old men from the chimney corner”, but he achieves a kind of fictional revenge for this when, in one tale, TV’s power to do just this is thwarted. It is the Luddites, and not just the humble, who shall inherit the Earth.

This review originally appeared in the Guardian