Sunday, 17 October 2021
Today marks a hundred years since the birth of George Mackay Brown (1921 - 1996). To celebrate this momentous date I have written an essay about what I consider to be Brown's most iconic, wide-ranging, forward-looking and prophetic work.
George Mackay Brown and His Vision of Greenvoe
Introduction
Frequently referred to as the Orkney Bard, George Mackay Brown lived a life that was narrowly defined, but his artistic vision transcended borders and time. Leaving his home town of Stromness only rarely he possessed a remarkable gift that allowed his imagination to harvest from the past in order to seed the present. He captured in words, with enormous grace and sensitivity, the traditions and significant themes of ancient history and wrought them into poems and stories which feel at once old, yet also uncannily relevant to a contemporary readership. He reminds us of the importance of noting Nature's rhythms and how they shape our lives. As Berthold Schoene writes in his study, The Making of Orcadia: Narrative Identity in the Prose Work of George Mackay Brown (Schoene, 1995 : 26):-
History is not a dead deposit burdening or paralysing our contemporary existence, rather, it is a meaning-productive process from which we draw the energy and motivation we need to tackle the future.
Brown knew intrinsically that as a poet and writer, practising at a time when literature and the arts as a whole were undergoing massive change, he had a duty to his readers, however reluctantly, to convey in his work his awareness of standing on the cusp between two eras. The Age of Enlightenment was still much more than merely a fading shadow in the minds of writers and artists, but the desire to update old ideas and to experiment with new ones was increasingly tempting. Refusing to respect the excitement progress and modernity engendered in his contemporaries would have meant being left behind in terms of getting work published and gaining personal recognition. Brown was, however, adamant that the present cannot be considered without acknowledging the influences of the past.
In An Orkney Tapestry (1969), an anthology of Brown's first prose writings, he says, "contemporary Orkney, cut off from the story of its past is meaningless" (Brown, 1973 : 19). While Brown's poems and short stories hark back to the past and deal almost exclusively with subjects inspired by the Norse sagas, Orkney's history, traditions, landscape and elements of the supernatural, his novels are more forward-looking in how they address issues that were, in his era, both historic and contemporary. This is particularly true of his first novel, Greenvoe (1972) and it is this notion of contemporary relevance that I wish to focus on in my essay.
Brown wrote Greenvoe as a direct response to the threat of Uranium mining in Orkney during the 1970s. It was a peril which brought together the Orkney people as never before. As one body they stood up against the powers of the energy companies and the UK Government who wanted to dig up the land along the so-called 'Uranium corridor', which stretched from Brown's birth-place, Stromness, to the cliffs of Yesnaby, on the west coast of Mainland Orkney. It took almost a decade of concerted effort on the part of Orcadians to avert the danger that many said would have meant devastation for the Orkney Islands. In 1980, the Prime Minister at the time, Margaret Thatcher, personally visited Orkney to assure its residents that excavations for Uranium would not go ahead.
Of all his novels, Brown's first gathers together most perfectly in a single narrative, the issues which were closest to his heart — community, tradition, Nature's cycle, religion, memory, identity, the past and the contemporary. It embraces, furthermore, elements of mystery, the supernatural, the Gothic and the psychological. Greenvoe takes the reader on a journey. Its multi-layered structure is deceptively simple and deliberately misleading. The reader's first impression is that of a charming tale about a community in which folk are hard-working, honest and helpful to their neighbours. This perception quickly takes on a Gothic perspective which becomes progressively more dystopian in nature as Brown reveals the circumstances, flaws, emotional burdens and secrets of each of his characters. The reader comes to understand that Greenvoe is not the cohesive community it might at first appear to be.
Brown converted to Catholicism in 1961 and although he disliked being referred to as a Catholic writer he nevertheless was preoccupied with certain religious themes and tropes which he employed time and again in his writings. Their repeated use are an indication of the importance Brown gave to his faith. In Greenvoe evidence of this can be seen in the author's use of biblical references which punctuate the text. The most obvious of these is the ancient religious ritual, known as the ‘Ceremony of the Master Horsemen’, which celebrates the cycle of the agricultural year. A section of the ritual ends each of the novel's six chapters and serves to move the story forward.
Greenvoe has a timeless feel to it. It is the story of a small fishing and farming community on the fictional island of Hellya which, in the space of a week, is annihilated by the corporate greed of a bunch of faceless bureaucrats who infiltrate the village of Greenvoe to head the mysterious Operation Black Star. Although Brown does not specify the precise era in which his novel is set, it carries an ambience that suggests it could be the late 1940s or early 1950s, the period immediately after the Second World War. At the school children are made to recite a list of famous battles which ends with the Battle of Stalingrad - 1943 (Brown, 2004 : 83), but there is no indication that this date has any bearing on the novel's context beyond showing the reader that it was a time when rote learning was common practice in schools. Brown makes no mention of the War. Neither are there signs of austerity or poverty. Quite the opposite, in fact. Greenvoe's Laird and his family are clearly well-healed people and the village shop appears to be well-stocked and frequented. Children are well-fed, eating bread and jam on their way to school (Brown, 2004 : 4) and customers come to the shop to buy bacon (ibid : 3) and bread, candles, paraffin, margarine and ball-point pens (ibid : 5).
Operation Black Star
At the heart of Greenvoe lies the ominous Operation Black Star. Brown leaves its purpose open to the reader's speculation. In an essay, entitled Oil and the Orcadians, penned shortly after his novel's publication, Brown outlined its core idea (Brown, 1972 : 1):-
….. the purpose of Operation Black Star was left deliberately vague. It could be an early-warning system, or a probe for uranium or oil.
Diggers arrive on the island and a construction site is set up (Brown, 2004 : 203-5; 208-14). The disenfranchised villagers are powerless to stand up to the intruders. Instead of gathering strength through the garnering of support from their neighbours, Greenvoe's inhabitants adopt a passive-aggressive stance in which they take self-protective action, but do nothing to attempt to avert the threat to their island and livelihoods. They simply hide themselves away in their homes, as long as these remain standing. In acts of unconscious self-preservation they build invisible walls around themselves, thus separating their inner and private lives from the façade which they present to their neighbours and the outside world. On the occasions they do venture out they treat the people they meet with unaccustomed wariness. Their attitude is that of a voiceless, disintegrating community unconcerned about the wellbeing of others. As Brown brilliantly puts it (Brown, 2004 : 210):-
..... piecemeal the village died [and] Greenvoe shrivelled in the radiance of Black Star.
It is in this part of the narrative that Greenvoe takes on an overtly psychological context. The bureaucrats running Operation Black Star gradually and surreptitiously manipulate the folk of the island of Hellya into a state of abject fear. The Scarf, a Marxist and Greenvoe's self-appointed amateur social historian, tells of how he has got himself a job as a clerk in the offices of Operation Black Star. There he finds cabinets filled with files on almost all of Greenvoe's inhabitants (Brown, 2004 : 211 - 213). The question of how reliable a narrator The Scarf is cannot be ignored.
The villagers' fear for their future and that of Greenvoe manifests itself in several ways. Arguably, the least surprising are drink and violence. Simon Mckee, the Minister, who believes he has kept his alcoholism a secret thus far, throws caution to the wind when he purchases several bottles of whisky at once at the hotel bar. He says they are for others. His mother, for medicinal purposes (Brown, 2004 : 48-49), or the request of a friend in Australia who has heard about the excellent quality of Orkney’s malt (ibid : 178). The community has, of course, long been aware of its Minister's affliction, but out of respect for his mother the villagers talk about it only amongst themselves. Like many psychologically unstable people the Minister believes he can juggle duty and addiction unnoticed by the community. Since his mind is overloaded with all the internal conversations which that entails he chooses to shut out the fact that his problem is widely known.
Two fishermen, Bert Kerston and Samuel Whaness have a quarrel. When Kerston steals his catch Whaness is uncharacteristically provoked into attacking the thief (Brown, 2004 : 104 - 105). Brown momentarily plays devil's advocate when he depicts Whaness as the villain and Kerston as the victim. Later, Whaness tries to seek revenge by making for the dangerous cliffs of Red Head in bad weather when he thinks Kerston is unlikely to do so (Brown, 2004 : 147). As he congratulates himself on finding his creels well filled, however, his boat is enveloped in fog and thrown about on heavy seas. Finally, Whaness' boat, the Siloam, crashes against the cliffs and collapses on top of him (ibid : 148 - 149).
Brown tricks the reader into assuming that Whaness’ bid to avenge himself has ended in his tragic death. Notice the symbolism and psychological guile which the author employs here. He describes, in Bunyanesque fashion, how Whaness wanders about beneath the waves, meeting God in a land of beauty and seeing himself as a young man again (ibid : 184 - 192). Suddenly, Whaness comes across the wreck of Bert Kerston’s boat and sees his body. In a startling reversal of the surreal and the real the reader learns that while Whaness attempts to resuscitate his enemy in the next world, Kerston is doing the same for him in the present one (ibid : 192 - 193):-
‘So you’re alive’, said Bert Kerston above him. ‘By God, Whaness, you nearly had it today. The sea nearly got you. You’ll never be closer.’
Brown toys with the dual concepts of good versus evil and the notion that harm does not always come to those who have inflicted it on others. Instead, it befalls, more cruelly, those who are generally law-abiding, but who transgress in one brief unconscious moment of madness.
Some Freudian theory is apt here. It could be said that through the threat presented by Operation Black Star, and their fear of being made homeless, Greenvoe's inhabitants become split personalities (Freud, 1920 : 277). They dread being judged for their alarm and so pretend to be unconcerned by the Stranger who moves into the hotel ahead of the arrival on the island of the team of construction workers (Brown, 2004 : 36). By the time work begins and the destruction of people's homes takes place, terror has washed over the community and distrust reigns. It is full-scale abjection. In her essay, Powers of Horror, the Bulgarian-French philosopher and sociologist, Julia Kristeva (b.1941), describes the phenomenon thus (1982 : 4):-
There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant force, outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable.
Ivan Westray is Hellya's ferryman. He is a man with a huge ego and great sexual appetite. Having wooed the island's school teacher, Miss Margaret Inverary, for a period he asks her to give him a sign when she is ready to consummate their relationship (Brown, 2004 : 15):-
‘Light that green lamp and set it in your window upstairs at ten o’clock’, said Ivan Westray. ‘Then I’ll know I can come.'
The teacher continues to hold out to him and when he rebukes her for it by telling her: 'that was the arrangement’ (ibid : 15), there is an implied threat that if she takes much longer about it Westray will take her against her will. It sets a portent of what he is capable of as is seen later when he rapes the Laird’s granddaughter, Inga Fortin-Bell (ibid : 198 - 199).
The rape scene captures the deep psychological and Gothic unease that is the invisible glue of Greenvoe’s plot. Just as Operation Black Star is a metaphor for the disintegration of Hellya's community, specifically, and society as whole, so too is the ferryman's treatment of Inga. It depicts a scenario that is timeless. Human behaviour at its most depraved is both ancient and contemporary. With its intensely symbolic use of fog and ominous language Brown creates an atmosphere that is in keeping with the darkest traditions of both Gothic and psychological storytelling. When Westray collects Inga in his boat following her visit to the lighthouse keeper, Donald McAra, they become lost in fog. Inga tries to hide her fear by making light of it, but in doing so she fuels the unease of the uncanny scene to the point that it reads like a passage from a psychological thriller (Brown, 2004 : 197):-
‘It’s like a journey into the land of the dead’, said Inga lightly.
Westray addresses the girl’s concerns as though voicing an unconscious premonition that has wider implications than merely acknowledging the dangerous situation in which they find themselves. Westray tells her (ibid : 197):-
'….. you can’t live forever. I would rather die in the sea than in the eventide home.'
Then, moments before Westray throws Inga down on the deck of his boat and rapes her (ibid : 198 - 199), he speaks these particularly spine-chilling words (ibid : 197):-
'The fog ….. it twists everything. Sights, sounds, feelings.'
I suggest that there is considerable overlap, or synergy, between the Gothic and the psychological elements of Greenvoe. The scene described above, in which Ivan Westray takes Inga Fortin-Bell out in his boat with the intention of getting inside her knickers, whether she consents or not, and his previous threat to Margaret Inverary, not only show Westray's vile attitude towards vulnerable young women in his community, it is also an example of both the Gothic and the psychological aspects of the novel converging.
Operation Black Star represents the most post-modern element of the novel, symbolising all which George Mackay Brown perceived as evil about progress, modernity and life in the second half of the twentieth century. It embodies the fostering of a culture of fear, iniquitous corruption and a total disregard for the value of human life. It is a stark reminder of the atrocities (loss of life, mind, health, home, belongings, identity) which so many thousands had suffered in the two World Wars. Isobel Murray and Bob Tait, scholars in Modern Scottish Literature, in their critical study of Greenvoe, go as far as suggesting that the project represents the arrival of Satan in the community who performs "a hideous death-dealing parody of the liberating life-bringing Christ". They argue that (1984 : 149):-
Operation Black Star is the personification of Evil since it is ‘so anti-human' that it takes on the form of inanimate modern building materials, especially the concrete which Mackay Brown so deplores. (ref: Brown, 2004 : 238)
In light of the Orwellian nature of Operation Black Star it is surprising that Brown’s literary interests and influences are not recorded as having included the works of George Orwell since Brown must have been aware of his writings. The nameless silent Stranger, whose signature in the hotel’s guest book is indecipherable, stays in his room for almost the entire duration of his visit. He is recorded only once venturing out for a brief early-evening stroll around Greenvoe, making secretive notes at a time when most of its residents are likely to be indoors having their tea and his walkabout won't attract attention (Brown, 2004 : 203 - 205). The Stranger is not merely a voiceless, but menacing presence in Brown’s novel, he also encapsulates the concepts of authoritarianism and tyranny on the grandest scale. Through the clandestine psychological manipulations of folk and the brutal destruction of their village Operation Black Star makes the poorest in the community even poorer, ultimately destroying lives and livelihoods.
The Psychology of Symbolism
A further psychological element of Greenvoe is that Brown endows each of his main characters with a symbolic role that goes beyond merely being a member of a small fictional community. The author depicts their functions in such a subtle way that they do not jar or disrupt the storytelling. The most obvious example of this literary device is Alice Voar, the mother of seven children, each the offspring of a different father. Voar is the old Norse word for ‘spring’, traditionally known as ’seed-time’. Brown’s choice of nomenclature for Alice, therefore, is a reference to her promiscuity which reflects an instability of character, manifesting itself in a readiness to yield to several sexual partners. In terms of Freudian psychology it could be said that by giving in to those men and to her desires her conscious mind was taken over by her unconscious. In biblical terms, she easily submitted to physical temptation. The resulting children are, hence, symbolic of both good and evil. They are, on the one hand, a blessing, whilst on the other, Alice is being punished when the relationship with their respective fathers does not last.
Brown carefully weighs up the number of characters in his novel who are extremely devout and conscientiously practice their faith (fisherman Sam Whaness and his wife Rachel, and Mrs. Elizabeth McKee, the mother of Greenvoe's Minister), against those who indulge in what the Church regards as immoral practices (fisherman Bert Kerston neglecting his pregnant wife, Ellen, and the ferryman Ivan Westray’s raping of Inga Fortin-Bell). In order to portray the psychological imbalances of those within his fictional community and the fact that, as in real life, things are not always what they seem, Brown goes on to examine the consciences of the characters who, on the surface live ‘good’ lives, unsullied by sin, but who actually practice alternative lifestyles or engage in activities which are less than honest (the Minister, Simon McKee, attempting to disguise his drinking problem and Bert Kerston selling his catch of lobsters on the Scottish mainland, not to provide for his family, but to fund his own penchant for beer and whisky). The misdemeanours of these individuals appear relatively insignificant outside the characters’ own circumstances and family circle. Collectively, however, their untruths are indicative of the slow collapse of the community in which they live.
The Reborn and the Martyr
The most perturbing instance of the internalising of fear felt in Greenvoe's community is that of the Minister's mother, Mrs. Mckee. Prey to bouts of mental anguish and melancholia, she spends hours at a time mulling over past events in her life. So intensely does she engage herself in the activity that she is practically reliving them, even recalling conversations word for word. Brown presents these musings as extended stream-of-consciousness writing. By his own admission he felt a close bond with Mrs. McKee, seeing her as the most ‘assertive’ character in the novel. In his autobiography, For the Islands I Sing, published posthumously, Brown says (1997 : 174):-
Mrs. McKee, whom I grew to love more and more as the novel unfolded, led me gently into her past life ….. she led me into places of the mind I knew a little about, those places of guilt, prosecution, judgement, which, while they last, make life bitter and terrible.
Occasionally Mrs. McKee appears to fictionalise events in her head, either partially, or in their entirety, such as when she recalls family occasions when her son, Simon, was still a young lad. One particular episode begins with her imagining herself as a member of the Scottish Royal Court (Brown, 2004 : 106):-
It was the ecclesiastical division of the court Mrs. McKee decided at once. She had the feeling of Sabbath peace and gravestones; she could almost hear the rustling of bands and black gowns.
During her reflections Mrs. McKee steps out of herself, back into another era. She is barely conscious that her fantasies are taking her away from the present. Time and reality blur (ibid : 106):-.
Indeed, she felt rather important, sitting in her rocking-chair with the blue velvet cushion at her back. Fancy clever people going to all that trouble on her account. She felt – Oh, gracious! – like one of the handmaidens of Mary Queen of Scots, beautiful and fated, while the speech lasted.
Brown’s use of long paragraphs suggests a growing loss of control. Mrs. McKee is mourning a past which, in the glow of happy reminiscences, feels safe and unthreatening – a time when everyone in the community worked hard and got on well together. In a Freudian context her melancholia could be said to be a grieving for an ideal which has been lost to her (Freud, 2006[a] : 310).
Mrs. McKee’s symptoms – losing track of connections, misremembering the sequence of events, recalling memories in isolation – are, as Freud suggests in his essay Remembering, Repeating and Working Through (Freud, 2006[b] : 393), a typical manifestation of the mental processing of life experiences. Rowena and Brian Murray, in their critique of Brown’s works, Interrogation of Silence, note that (Murray & Murray, 2004 : 134):-
Mrs McKee’s physical decline is paralleled by her psychological deterioration, which in turn parallels the decline of the village and the relationships between the villagers. All experience a form of ‘trial’ appropriate to their perceived failings.
After a spell in hospital during which Mrs. McKee is unconscious and delirious by turns she unexpectedly makes a nigh complete recovery. This is how Brown describes it (Brown, 2004 : 219):-
She knew at once where she was, from the sound on the stone outside. She was in her own city, Edinburgh. It was a beautiful day in spring; she knew it was spring from the slant of light on her face. Among Edinburgh silences, birds sang in the trees. All her senses were quickened.
Elizabeth Mckee's mental distress and miraculous recovery is not hers alone. It is yet another instance in which Brown employs its dark connotations as a literary device to symbolise the anguish and fragility of the entire island of Hellya, followed by its resurrection with which the author ends his novel.
Perhaps the most tragic character in the novel is The Skarf who spends entire evenings in the hotel bar reading his manuscript, describing Hellya's past, to his fellow drinkers (Brown, 2004 : 18-21). I suggest that in creating him Brown is examining his own personality. His choice to include the definitive article in the curious name implies that he sees the character as the embodiment of a set of traits and beliefs borne within the community in which The Skarf lives, rather than being a breathing, thinking individual of flesh and blood in his own right. The inference is that The Skarf carries the moral and ethical weight of the people of Hellya on his shoulders. He is, so to speak, the martyr of the story. In the Northern Isles 'skarf' is the local word for cormorant, a bird which feeds on fish. Fish, in turn, are full of biblical symbolism. The irony is that The Skarf has a dislike for fishing, although he has a boat which he has christened the Engels after the German-English socialist and philosopher, Friedrich Engels (1820 - 1895), who in 1948, together with Karl Marx (1818 - 1883), wrote the Communist Manifesto.
As a historian and Marxist, The Skarf has multiple contradictory personalities. They reveal themselves through his opposing interests. The historian in him wishes to preserve and record the past, while the Marxist part of him desires historical and social change. Brown presents, here, an unconscious struggle for supremacy between The Skarf's supposedly innocent hobby of writing Greenvoe’s social history, on the one hand, and his Marxist interests, which might be deemed inappropriate in a small remote island community, on the other.
The Skarf’s narrative plays a dual function. Whilst looking back at Hellya’s legacy it also foreshadows calamity. In describing the natural, cyclical way in which life and nature moved in the past, he implies that these things will not last for ever. The Skarf’s knowledge and work symbolise a Foucaultian awareness of power and social control (Foucault, 2002 : 44). His sources, research methods and associations are never mentioned, but it would be unsurprising if some readers don't wonder whether The Skarf is somehow involved in Operation Black Star, particularly as he is the only member of the community who finds employment in their offices.
Timothy Baker, in his monograph, George Mackay Brown and the Philosophy of Community (2009), explains the psychological enigma of The Skarf’s work thus (Baker, 2009 : 36):-
The Skarf’s writings encapsulates all the violence of the past, but cannot stand against the violence of modernity itself; what is written can be destroyed. In Greenvoe the forces of modernity underwrite all that has been written, and in doing so prove the inefficacy of the written word.
When The Skarf reads his manuscript he does so in a soft, persuasive voice close to Brown’s own style of speaking and writing. Like Brown, The Skarf feels at once imprisoned by his way of life and his community but is, at the same time somewhat lost and rudderless. He oscillates between doing what is expected of him — daily going out fishing to make a living — and searching for something to satisfy his own ambition as an aspiring social historian. An example of this conundrum is his conversation with Olive Evie, the shopkeeper in the village store, which takes place near the beginning of the novel (Brown, 2004 : 4 - 5):-
‘You’re not at the fishing today, I see’ said Mrs. Olive Evie.
'That was the worst thing you ever did, Skarf, going to work with your uncle at the lobsters. You with all that brains. You should have gone on to school,then the university.'The Skarf responds (ibid : 5):-
‘The Lord works in a mysterious way, his wonders to perform.’
His reply reflects a sense of hopelessness as well as suggesting an unconscious faith in redemption; a feeling that it is only a matter of time before he finds his proper calling. It is a personal journey that he shares with Greenvoe’s author. Brown's opportunity for escaping his own frustrations of living in a cloistered, insular environment — Stromness in the 1940s and 1950s — were his sojourns to study in Edinburgh. Furthermore, his conversion to Catholicism released him from the dogma of his Calvinistic upbringing which he had so resented. His new faith provided him with the ‘grounding’ and sense of direction which, until then, he had been lacking.
For The Skarf the outcome is rather more tragic. When his employment file reveals his Marxist interests he finds himself quickly and unceremoniously dismissed from his job at the offices of Operation Black Star. Returning home to discover his house has been turned to rubble in his absence, he walks to the beach, fills his pockets with stones, unties his boat and starts rowing (Brown, 2004 : 222 - 223).
The Skarf and Mrs. McKee are motivated by similar desires. Both are "concerned with constructing an answerable history", as Timothy Baker puts it (2009 : 50). While Mrs. McKee’s is a personal one, The Skarf narrates on behalf of the community in order to help it remember its heritage. For him, the exercise has not only a historical purpose, but also a political one. I would argue, however, that neither character is a reliable narrator since their rhetoric is coloured by their own individually distorted perspectives.
Death and Rebirth of a Community
The final chapter of Greenvoe reads like part of a Cold War novel. The names of those heading Operation Black Star are never revealed and the secrecy surrounding their identities and the real purpose of Operation Black Star creates a dramatic, angry tension not seen elsewhere in Brown’s work. The description of unaccustomed sounds and heightened activity is at once a depiction of the apocalyptic events taking place on the island as well as a foreshadowing of the effects of industrialisation and urbanisation which will, in time, invade even the smallest corner of the Earth. Brown writes (Brown, 2004 : 208):-
The island began to be full of noises — a roar and a clangour.
It could be said that Greenvoe's community is being possessed by the 'authorities', as its inhabitants refer to the faceless bureaucrats on the rare occasions they find themselves being forced to interact with them (Brown, 2004 : 209). They are no longer able to think clearly and freely in order to make sense of what is going on, nor are they able to take a stand against the destruction taking place.
As they watch their homes, and then the hotel, being bulldozed to the ground, the villagers undergo Freudian personality changes which mirror Greenvoe's demise. Those who have relations on the Scottish mainland flee the island or travel to Hrossey (the Norse name for the Orkney Mainland). In other words, Brown plays with the notion that Hellya is part of a larger archipelago. Alison Voar, whose sister and only relative refuses to help her, is forced to take her children into the hills above Hamnavoe (the Norse name for Stromness) where they find accommodation in an old army hut from the Second World War (Brown, 2004 : 211).
Poor Mrs. McKee is only vaguely aware of occurrences outside her front door during episodes of sleep, fitful dreams and states of half-consciousness. Later, as she is lying in hospital in Edinburgh, her only visitor is her son, Simon (ibid : 220 - 221). But while she is still in a state of delirium before making her uncanny recovery, it is unclear whether it is Simon in the flesh or merely the wishful thinking of her fevered imagination.
Just as the reader reconciles himself to the novel's dark conclusion, Brown springs a surprise. He brings back seven of his characters who had left Greenvoe a decade earlier after the dramatic events of Operation Black Star. All, but one had been children when their families were forced to leave Hellya. Amongst them is Mansie Anderson. He plays only a small, but important role in the novel. When faced with eviction he shows tremendous tenacity trying to save his family's home, thus symbolising the archetypal Orcadian with his spirited determination (Brown, 2004 : 234).
Now an old man, Anderson represents the penultimate biblical reference in the book in the form of Noah returning to the Ark. After the seven men enact the final stage in the ancient ‘Ceremony of Master Horsemen’, Anderson leads the dedication in which the men bid the proper goodbye to the island which they were denied ten years earlier. When the other men, in their roles as 'Master Horsemen', believe they hear the word Resurrection in the sound of dust being whipped up by the wind, they see it as a sign of hope and a portent that there will be a future for Greenvoe and for Hellya after all (Brown, 2004 : 242). The last line of the novel makes this indeed a possibility. Its final sentence is also the final biblical allusion (ibid : 243):-
The sun rose. The stones were warm. They broke the bread.
Conclusion
There are several reasons why George Mackay Brown's novel is not kailyard fiction. Firstly, it does not discuss the culture, politics or social issues of the day. Besides the ambience Brown creates in his narrative, suggesting the 1940s or 1950s, the period in which Greenvoe is set is deliberately vague.This enables the novel to transcend historical epochs and to make it at once ancient and contemporary. Secondly, although the novel is clearly about a small rural community there is nothing nostalgic or stereotypical about the story being told or the characters which inhabit it. Thirdly, there is no evidence of an overly obsessive preoccupation with either piety or poverty. Mrs. McKee is the only character whose religious conviction is taken to extremes. In her case, the fragility of her mental state is a mitigating circumstance. Her son, the Minister, has little obvious passion for his office (Brown, 2004 : 178) and, as noted earlier, the village shop, as the hub for gossip and the women's reflections on their neighbours (ibid : 3 & 4), gives the impression of being well-stocked.
Interestingly, nowhere in his fiction does George Mackay Brown document either a singular unified community, nor a world made up solely of individuals living their lives quietly without significant external influences. Instead, Brown focuses on tensions between characters and the community or environment in which they find themselves.
The final stage of 'The Master Horsemen Ceremony' is the first and only occasion in Greenvoe where there is a sense of unity between the characters. The seven men who return to Hellya after a ten-year absence are united in their desire for redemption. Each man playing his part in the concluding cycle of the ritual is a 'working-together' to bring about the rebirth of a community and land that had been lost to them. In doing so they are displaying not only a sense of nostalgia for a bygone era, but also a desire for a future in an age in which progress and modernity promise personal growth and fulfillment as well as a more cohesive island community.
In his study, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1996), the Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire (1921–1997) talks about what happens when a community is invaded by external forces. When a new physical presence is established the social order of the community is disrupted, he writes. Its collective worldview is destroyed and that of the infiltrators becomes the dominant one. Effectively, "the natural order of things which previously existed within the community is annihilated" (Freire, 1996 : 134).
I think George Mackay Brown would have appreciated the ideas expressed by the German philosopher, Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900 - 2002), for whom the past and present were a dialogue:-
The present is only ever understandable through the past, with which it forms a living continuity; and the past is always grasped from our own partial viewpoint within the present. (Gadamer, 2004 : 83)
About art he wrote:-
We enter the alien world of the artefact, but at the same time gather it into our own realm, reaching a more complete understanding of ourselves. Rather than 'leaving home', we 'come home'. (ibid : 22 & 23)
Brown's novel, Greenvoe is all of these things. It is art, because fiction is an aesthetic creation. In its celebration of an ancient religious ritual it is a glance back to the past and tradition. Through Operation Black Star, with its implied corporate greed that is willing to sacrifice the lives and livelihoods of an entire community in order to accrue wealth and fame, it is an astute vision of the present. Most significantly, perhaps, it is a declaration that the human behaviour depicted in Greenvoe is innate to our species and never wavers regardless of which period of history is placed under the spotlight.
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NOTES
Baker, T.C. (2009) George Mackay Brown and the Philosophy of Community. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press
Brown, G.M. (1973) An Orkney Tapestry. London: Quartet Books Limited
Brown, G.M. (1997) For the Islands I Sing. London: John Murray (Publishers)
Brown, G.M. (2004) Greenvoe. Edinburgh: Polygon
Brown, G.M. (1972) Oil and the Orcadians. Orkney Library & Archive: Undated essay (ts) filed in the George Mackay Brown Collection under ref. D124/2/4/29
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