Beside the Ocean of Time.

Henry, Richard

George Mackay Brown's BESIDE the Ocean of Time might have been subtitled "A Writer's Life." The novel recaps Brown's continuing preoccupations as 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 from the past to demonstrate an essential "Orkney" experience validating its current chronicle, Beside the Ocean of Time further demonstrates this continuity by incorporating 800 years of Orkney history into a twentieth-century narrative on the life of Thorfinn Ragnarson.

The experience has changed little despite the ] technological upheavals of the past ninety years. Life on the islands remains sharply tuned to a number of cycles: those of the seasons, those of men and women from birth to death, and the inevitable series of invaders who surge and recede like the ocean tide. The cyclic nature of the Orcadian experience has provided ample material for Brown and serves as one structural frame upon which he builds his narratives. It also provides him with his most powerful means of asserting the continuity of Orcadian experience: argument by association. In the juxtaposing of two or more events, their shared features are made fully manifest despite the centuries separating them.

Beside the Ocean of Time comprises eight episodes from Ragnarson's life, from his childhood in the 1920s and 1930s, through the war of the 1940s, to a reflective look backward from the late 1960s. Despite the focus on Ragnarson, Brown is generally concerned with the social, historical, and natural facets of the islands. These concerns are explored in full as Brown reprises eight centuries of Orcadian history in the lives of the twentieth-century islanders. The distinction between past and present is most heavily maintained in the opening episodes, "The Road to Byzantium" and "Bannockburn," where a young Thorfinn dreams his journey with a band of Norsemen traveling down the Volga to Constantinople in the 1100s and his journey as squire to the Battle of Bannockburn (1314). In these opening stories the past is romantically figured and framed by an ordinary and mundane present. The distinction between past and present is not complete, however, nor is the past the only shaping force. In "Bannockburn," for example, the present informs the past-Thorfinn peoples his dream with the local innkeeper and the horse the blacksmith is shoeing.

One of the experiences running through Beside the Ocean of Time is that of displacement -- from the displacements of the islands, "original" people by emigrants from Alba, Cornwall, and Sicily nearly two thousand years ago, the conscription of young men by the press gangs of King George III, and the displacements initiated by the British government during World War II, when it requisitioned the entire island of Norday for an air force base (an event treated more fully in Brown's 1972 novel Greenvoe). Resistance is often passive and, with time, often successful. The emigrants from Alba, for example, build an impregnable castle and stow themselves away in it when invaders arrive. The islanders hide their young men in smugglers' caves until the press gangs leave. Even the commandeering of the island by the British is temporary. The islanders begin returning soon after the base is abandoned.

In addition to nicely juxtaposing two moments in time to expose their essential similarities, the tales are enriched by subtly juxtaposing Thorfinn with other members of the community. This further heightens Brown's assertion of the continuity of the Orcadian community in spite of, or even in the face of what appears to be utter annihilation. Like John Eagle in the novella "The Golden Bird" (1987), the Skarf in Greenvoe (1972), and Einhof Sigmundson in the novel Vinland (1992), Thorfinn, the dreamer/writer, is often physically and socially outside the normal sphere of his tribe. The locations of his fancies, the prow of a boat in a shed, on an isolated rock on the beach when everyone else is up on a ridge, as well as the status accorded him by his fellow human beings, the teacher's labeling him a lazy and useless boy or as a prisoner of war, permit him the special perspective from which he can describe the islands and his people. This perspective, both inside and outside the community and inside and outside the constraints of time, no doubt led to the shortlisting of Beside the Ocean of Time for the 1994 Booker Prize.