What Alasdair Gray was to Glasgow, George Mackay Brown was to Orkney: a tutelary creative spirit. He lived most of his life in Stromness. ‘Orkney,’ he claimed, ‘is a small green world in itself,’ and his imaginative engagement with this world spans centuries. He can write about modern crofters in one story and about their Viking forebears in another, as if what happens now and what happened in the distant past are equally newsworthy. There is a poetic compression and simplicity to his prose that harkens back to the Orkneyinga Saga. (The same is even more true for his poetry, which rises from the same source as his fiction: verse narratives that encompass all generations.) I’ve chosen ‘Witch’, from Mackay Brown’s first story collection, because it exemplifies the qualities listed above. It’s a masterful instance of historical fiction: a genre we tend to associate more with the novel than the short form. In what reads like a contemporaneous account – officially dispassionate, yet contextually indignant – we follow the fate of Marian Isbister, a servant girl accused of witchcraft. Mackay Brown dwells on the surface of gestures and speech, inviting us to interpret the action and its injustices. This is fiction as act of restorative justice. If you haven’t read any George Mackay Brown, Polygon Books have issued a Selected Stories that would add lustre to your bookshelves.
First published in A Calendar of Love by George Mackay Brown, The Hogarth Press, 1967
A Personal Anthology 