Time in a Red Coat

by George Mackay Brown

Book by Brown, George Mackay

Genres: Fiction

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

George Mackay Brown, the poet, novelist and dramatist, spent his life living in and documenting the Orkney Isles.

A bout of severe measles at the age of 12 became the basis for recurring health problems throughout his life. Uncertain as to his future, he remained in education until 1940, a year which brought with it a growing reality of the war, and the unexpected death of his father. The following year he was diagnosed with (then incurable) Pulmonary Tuberculosis and spent six months in hospital in Kirkwall, Orkney's main town.

Around this time, he began writing poetry, and also prose for the Orkney Herald for which he became Stromness Correspondent, reporting events such as the switching on of the electricity grid in 1947. In 1950 he met the poet Edwin Muir, a fellow Orcadian, who recognised Mackay Brown's talent for writing, and would become his literary tutor and mentor at Newbattle Abbey College, in Midlothian, which he attended in 1951-2. Recurring TB forced Mackay Brown to spend the following year in hospital, but his experience at Newbattle spurred him to apply to Edinburgh University, to read English Literature, returning to do post-graduate work on Gerard Manley Hopkins.

In later life Mackay Brown rarely left Orkney. He turned to writing full-time, publishing his first collection of poetry, The Storm, in 1954. His writing explored life on Orkney, and the history and traditions which make up Orkney's distinct cultural identity. Many of his works are concerned with protecting Orkney's cultural heritage from the relentless march of progress and the loss of myth and archaic ritual in the modern world. Reflecting this, his best known work is Greenvoe (1972), in which the permanence of island life is threatened by 'Black Star', a mysterious nuclear development.

Mackay Brown's literary reputation grew steadily. He received an OBE in 1974 and was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1977, in addition to gaining several honorary degrees. His final novel, Beside the Ocean of Time (1994) was Booker Prize shortlisted and judged Scottish Book of the Year by the Saltire Society. Mackay Brown died in his home town of Stromness on 13th April 1996.

He produced several poetry collections, five novels, eight collections of short stories and two poem-plays, as well as non-fiction portraits of Orkney, an autobiography, For the Islands I Sing (1997), and published journalism.

Read more at:
http://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org....

Reviews

[Mary Tsiara · Rating 2 out of 5]

So I picked this one up at The Writer's Museum shop in Edinburgh because the blurb caught my attention. It was supposed to be about this young girl who was bestowed with a flute and a bag of silver and would wander through time from East through West, hunting down the dragon of war. Okay now that I think about it, I may have taken the blurb a bit too seriously. I thought this was fantasy. At least it sounded like an adventure.



What this book was instead was one loooooong allegory of war. This means that there was no action serving a narrative, no meaningful events or actual development in the characters. In fact, the setting and the characters would swift so quickly that it would leave you wondering if any of the things you spent so much time reading mattered at all. You may be into this kind of thing and sometimes I am too, but this time I picked this book in a mood for adventure and ended up with bad poetry.

- Who's to say bad poetry isn't an adventure in itself, am I right?
- ....................................... *crickets* .........................................

Bonus that nobody asked from this book: the word ''slut'' mentioned at least 5 times in every chapter. Seriously what's up with that?

Writing style: pretty good actually. You can't beat a good old nature/peace/war metaphor and this book is full of them.

Blurb: a tiny bit misleading

Cover and title 10/10 thou foul sirens, I've been served

All in all, I didn't hate this and I would pick up another work by George Mackay Brown. I just hope that this time I'll get one with an actual story, hopefully leading somewhere. If I ever feel the need to read about long allegories I'll grab Plato again. And that's something we don't want to happen now, do we.

[Saski · Rating 2 out of 5]

What did I think? Actually, I think that perhaps this book was not a novel. It is posing as a novel. It has a cover like a novel. But I think it is more an allegory or a metaphor or a polemic. Yes, a polemic. I am not a hawk or war monger, far from it. But were I one, this book would not have dissuaded me, would not have convinced me to become a dove.

All through it I kept asking, where are we and how did we end up here? And here? And here? The scenes were raw and should have had power, except that the reader is kept at a distance. Then the near-to-last chapter, the war museum, esp the chamber of future wars, what was that? Very strange and not to my taste, although, in all fairness, there were a few phrases that caught my attention, for example: Old wisdom out of the cluster of gathering shadows. But I don't think this one bit saves the whole book.

[Mark Allinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an extraordinary read. Beautifully and eerily written, a plea for peace which makes timely reading, and a scream of pain against the horrors of war down the ages. The book finds its resolution in the beautiful landscapes of the author’s Orkney homeland. Fantastical but with an evergreen message of warning and, ideally, hope which brings out the follies of the human condition and the threats they bring anew in each generation.