SOURCE: A review of Beside the Ocean of Time, in World Literature Today, Vol. 69, No. 4, Autumn, 1995, pp. 790-91.

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 preoccupationsas 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...