George Mackay Brown Critical Essay | Critical Review by Patrick Crotty

SOURCE: "Orcadian Epiphanies," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4827, October 6, 1995, p. 26.

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...
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