Customer Reviews

George Mackay Brown: The Life

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`George Mackay Brown: The Life' is compelling from the first word. It is a vivid, intelligent account of a complex man, beautifully written with a kind of passionate restraint and breathtaking honesty. The research is meticulous and the result full of integrity and insight - a remarkable achievement. Rooted in his island home, George Mackay Brown is often simplified, or pigeon-holed as some kind of backwater bard, or mystic sage. This book reveals the man's complexities: his self-critical toughness, his difficulties with relationships, his place both inside and outside the community in the islands he loved, his gifts as a sharp observer with a poetic intellect that shaped and honed his material into poetry and prose of a rare, distilled beauty.

Writing as someone who knew the writer in his later years, I heartily recommend the book to anyone who has any interest in the man or his work at any level. It is a work of art in itself and biography at its best: accessible, multi-layered and perceptive; in turn both searing and uplifting.

Pam Beasant, Stromness

This is a highly readable biography of the extraordinary writer that was George Mackay Brown. He lived most of his life in Orkney, but his novels, short stories and poetry have the complexity, language, imagination and spirituality of a much-travelled man. GMB did not have an easy life and remained puzzled by (and uncomfortable with) his celebrity. He did not enjoy good health for much of his life; he lived simply and was a modest man but not one of those tortured souls grinding out poetry in guilt-ridden angst. He was more complex than he appeared, with a spiritual, almost holy, feel for the past that he was able to share through the prism of Orkney. I learned much from this biography, which dips into a range of sources, both personal and published. It is wonderful to see where some of GMB's inspiration came from. He was certainly one of Britain's greatest poets (and that's saying something). His writings are well worth exploring - they really are a joy. This well-written biography is a good introduction to the man, but you are likely only to find the real GMB through his writing, and that is a journey well worth making. Highly recommended.

Part of Mackay Brown's prose is centered around Orkney's Norse

roots. Early on, he was affected profoundly by the Orkneyinga

Saga. So many of his books contain a true redition of an exciting

history.

Maggie Fergusson has in this biography helped us appreciate the life

of an author extraordinaire!

This is a wonderful biography: full of lyrical detail, and with an insight and sensitivity which delivers this self-effacing writer/poet to the reader with a genuine stamp of authenticity. Fergusson covers George's life in remarkable detail throughout, both within Orkney, and his adventures 'sooth' at Newbattle College, Edinburgh University, Rose Street pub/poet 'society', Aberdeen, Ireland et al. Although his creative/dissolute Edinburgh days are well drawn, Fergusson is able to magic an authentic sense of Orkney life, with its precious clear light and fragile Spring/Summer days, and the dark, roaring monster of winter, which grips both body and soul in a chill embrace.

The biography charts a similar pattern of 'rise and fall' in George's creative, and love life, and has a richly supporting cast of poets and writers from Scotland and elsewhere. The text is very well referenced, and interleaved with extracts from his and others work, which is exquisitely chosen to illustrate the points she makes, and has a deeply enriching quality. Drink, religion, love, illness and depression, all weave threads throughout this satisfying tapestry of George's life. At the last though, it is the clear sense of Orcadian magic, a spare, austere beauty, which shimmers in these pages, just as it does in the poetry and the prose of this incomparable island bard. For me, this comes as such a relief after the disappointment of George's bland 'autobiography' For the Islands I Sing: An Autobiography. Essential reading.

This is a highly readable biography of the extraordinary writer that was George Mackay Brown. He lived most of his life in Orkney, but his novels, short stories and poetry have the complexity, language, imagination and spirituality of a much-travelled man. GMB did not have an easy life and remained puzzled by (and uncomfortable with) his celebrity. He did not enjoy good health for much of his life; he lived simply and was a modest man but not one of those tortured souls grinding out poetry in guilt-ridden angst. He was more complex than he appeared, with a spiritual, almost holy, feel for the past that he was able to share through the prism of Orkney. I learned much from this biography, which dips into a range of sources, both personal and published. It is wonderful to see where some of GMB's inspiration came from. He was certainly one of Britain's greatest poets (and that's saying something). His writings are well worth exploring - they really are a joy. This well-written biography is a good introduction to the man, but you are likely only to find the real GMB through his writing, and that is a journey well worth making. Highly recommended.