BOOK: George Mackay Brown, "Hawkfall and Other Stories"

George Mackay Brown: Hawkfall and Other Stories. Edinburgh: Polygon, 2004, 2010. 9781904598183. ix + 212 pp.

I first heard of George Mackay Brown about fifteen years ago, when a volume of his collected poems appeared and was favourably reviewed in the Guardian. The Guardian, of course, has always been progressive in a slightly dotty way, but back then they probably still thought of themselves as primarily a newspaper (with a website attached to it) whose target audience were people that subscribed to it somewhere in England. That gave them a certain anchor-line to sanity, and I enjoyed visiting their website to read the book reviews, the letters to the editor, and very occasionally something else about cultural or political topics. Later they came to think of themselves as primarily a website (with a newspaper attached to it) whose target audience are woke people anywhere in the (English-speaking?) world, who come to the Guardian for their daily dose of outrage at whatever it has been decided that the woke tribe should be outraged about that particular day. As a result, they ended up publishing so much unhinged lunacy that I stopped reading them long ago.

Anyway, their review of Mackay Brown's Complete Poems piqued my curiosity and I ended up buying the book, being then much more reckless than now about buying books and much less keenly appreciative of the ponderous mass of unread books piling up on my shelves. I still have his Complete Poems on a shelf somewhere, still unread, awaiting their turn. What this episode meant, however, was that when I noticed Mackay Brown's Hawkfall and Other Stories in a bookstore a couple of years ago, I recognized the name and this prompted me to buy it.

I guess that what attracted me to Mackay Brown's work was the fact that he lived pretty much his whole life on the Orkney Islands, somewhere at the remotest northern edge of the British Isles, and that all his writing is connected to these islands. This in itself makes his work seem interesting to me, since I know next to nothing about the Orkneys. But the added bonus is that the idea of a literature rooted in and centred on such a small and remote geographical area presents such a stark contrast to the predominant trends of the present time, when diversity and global homogeneity, those two sides of the same shitty coin, seem to be the only order of the day, and when most literature seems to be written, and nearly all of it seems to be published, by people who can't imagine why anyone could, or would, or should, live anywhere else than in a handful of faceless, rootless, global megalopolises.

I greatly enjoyed the stories in this book. They are short but packed with events and characters, and Mackay Brown is great at using passing references to people mentioned earlier to weave a densely interconnected web, very much like life itself. Some few are set in what would have been the present at the time they were written, but mostly they are in set the past, some in the middle ages and some in the 19th or early 20th century. You can feel all the time what a strong sense the author has for the harsh natural environment of the islands and the tough, terror-ridden life that the inhabitants eked out there. His focusing on the earlier time periods was probably a good choice, because by the mid-to-late 20th century, technological progress and social changes probably meant that the smaller islands became depopulated and on the larger ones the life was no longer different from that on the mainland by as much as in earlier times.

(Note: spoiler warnings apply for the rest of this post.)

Hawkfall

This story is a series of five vignettes from different periods of Orkney history, with a few slight but noticeable elements connecting them and suggesting that there is a sort of continuity underlying them all. In the first section we witness the funeral of a prehistoric chief or “priest-king” and the installation of his successor. Their role is much along Frazerian lines, being committed to “perpetual virginity so that all else might be fruitful in field, in loch, in the great sea, in the marriage beds” (p. 4). At the end we see some fishermen carrying on with their work as usual, rather indifferent to these ceremonies (p. 6).

In the second scene, we see Thorfinn Sigurdson, a Norse earl of Orkney (a real person from the 11th century), return from a hunt and get involved in a Christian religious ceremony: while a bishop and several priests chant in Latin, the earl puts on a sackcloth shirt and tries to feel suitably penitent about his sins, of which he has committed plenty, but he doesn't seem to quite know how to feel repentance; he mostly just feels cold (pp. 9–10). The story seems to be set at a time when Christianity was a fairly recent introduction in the area (the wikipedia says Thorfinn was “instrumental in making Orkney and Shetland part of mainstream Christendom”).

By the third section, we're in the late 16th century, when Patrick Stewart was the earl of Orkney. He has a very cultured dinner with the French architect whom he has hired to design a new palace for him, and he shows infinite patience for the Frenchman's arrogance towards the barbarous level of civilization on the earl's court. But meanwhile, in a basement downstairs, the earl's officials are torturing an unfortunate farmer, trying to get him to give up his farm which an ancestor of his had received from Thorfinn — the same Norse earl whom we have encountered in the previous section.

In the fourth scene, it is the early 19th century and we are introduced to young laird Andrew, whose rather progressive ideas about agricultural development present a stark contrast with those of the local minister who is visiting him and whose rabid conservatism sees the spectre of the French revolution everywhere and regards every change as the first step towards anarchy. Meanwhile a peasant wedding is in progress in a nearby village, and a very lively and cheerful one too, except for the fact that the bride seems to be crying inconsolably; and sure enough, not long after midnight, a servant shows up to take her to the laird's hall. Wow — the droit de seigneur, which all the historians and debunkers never tire of assuring us has been nothing but a myth even in the darkest depths of the middle ages, is shown here as having been practised in the Orkneys as late as about 1820! What are we to make of this, and how to square it with the rather sympathetic impression that we get of the laird in the first half of this chapter?

We learn earlier in the story that many girls in that community are heavily pregnant at the time of their wedding, but not the one that is getting married today (p. 23). And we see the old woman who consoles the bride at the wedding “put her hand, last, to the bride's belly, and nodded decisively” (p. 28). Could it be then that it has been concluded, from the fact that she is still not pregnant at her wedding, that her bridegroom is infertile, and is that why it has been arranged that she would sleep with the laird? But there is a big flaw in this theory, namely that the laird did not know, until the day of the wedding, that she was not pregnant (p. 23).

Anyway, in the fifth scene, it is 1921 and the protagonist is a Mr. Langclett, an Orcadian shopkeeper and a descendant of the unfortunate bridegroom from the previous section. His wife died a year ago and he has fallen in love again, scandalously early and with a woman younger than himself by a scandalous number of years. He has a daughter who is a little over thirty and still unmarried and well on the way to becoming an old spinster, and he seems to be getting ready to tell her to move out of the house so he can get married to his new girlfriend. Nowadays this sort of situation would be a basis for a stepmom-themed threesome pr0n video, but in the real world of the 1920s Orkneys things are rather less salacious than that. The daughter tries to protect herself by enlisting the help of a local gossip and turning the community against his shockingly early remarriage. On the last page he seems to have changed his mind and is ready to break up with his new girlfriend; but then on the very last line he seems to be about to tell his daughter to move out anyway, so I really have no idea what he's actually going to do. In pr0n this sort of thing is called a ruined orgasm; I wonder if there's a term for it in literature? :]

What I particularly liked about this story are the numerous small details that link the five sections together. We've already seen a few: Adam, the tortured peasant in sec. 3, traces his farm back to a grant from the earl of sec. 2 (p. 15); the protagonist of sec. 5 is a descendant of the bridegroom from sec. 4 (p. 36). An antique coin brought to Mr. Langclett in sec. 5 possibly has a tenuous connection to earl Patrick from sec. 3 (p. 38).

Each section furthermore features a character with a flat nose, surely with the implication that these people are related to or even descended from each other: there's one among the fishermen in sec. 1, indifferent to the ceremonies (p. 6); there's one as a servant on Thorfinn's court in sec. 2 (p. 7); there's Adam, the victim of torture in sec. 3 (p. 17); there's the unfortunate bridegroom of sec. 4 (pp. 22, 29); but there's nobody such in sec. 5, unless we count the “broad nose” of the little “mongol” girl next door (p. 34). All these flat-nosed people are very prominently from the lower strata of society, and are indifferent to or victimized by the doings of the chiefs and earls and lairds above them. The idea, I guess, is that the elites at the top may change, rulers and kingdoms and nations and languages may come and go, but underneath all that there is a sort of continuity on the lower levels, the foundations of the social pyramid, which continue as an uninterrupted stream from the dim mists of prehistory even into Mackay's own time.

There is also the recurring mention of hawks: one is sacrificed during the ceremonies in section 1 (p. 5); earl Thorfinn has been out hawking in sec. 2 (p. 7); laird Andrew reads a religious passage mentioning a falcon falling (p. 24 — the closest we get to the title of the story, i.e. Hawkfall; I couldn't find the source of this passage by googling, and I suspect that Brown made it up himself; on the other hand, the verses quoted a little later on p. 25 are real, from William Shenstone's Pastoral Ballad); and lastly, Mr. Langclett in sec. 5 keeps a stuffed hawk in his shop (pp. 31, 42).

The Fires of Christmas

A pleasant and quite short story which, perhaps unsurprisingly, is not as cozy as the title would lead you to believe. Two medieval scenes, both set at Christmas time. First we see Earl Rognvald burn down the hall of his uncle, Earl Thorfinn (the same whom we met in the previous story!), but Thorfinn manages to escape and later kills Rognvald and burns down *his* hall. The next scene is set 89 years later, in the time of Earl Paul Hakonson. One of his supporters comes to complain that his home and family were burnt down by Paul's enemies; the earl shows him favour, for which he then almost gets murdered by a jealous courtier, but he gets warned in time and manages to kill his attacker instead.

The story ends with a note that both scenes were taken from a medieval saga; the author suggests that “[t]he second drama is not so dark and hopeless as the first”, seemingly because christianity got better established on the islands in the intervening period.

Tithonus

This story is set on Torsay, a small island which, judging by the wikipedia, lies not in the Orkneys but in the Inner Hebrides. It consists of a sequence of short scenes that present the gradual decline of the island's population over a period of several decades starting soon after the WW1; all the younger people are moving away in search of jobs, and the old ones are gradually dying off. By the time we reach the end of the story, the school, church and general store have all shut down, and you can guess that the days of the community are pretty much numbered (pp. 70, 73–4; the wikipedia tells us that the island was inhabited until the 1960s).

The story is told from the perspective of the laird, whose financial position presents a curious parallel with the decline of the island: due to some legal restrictions he seems to be collecting almost no money in rents (p. 59), and all his income is a fixed £200 a year that he inherited from his grand-uncle. This may have been adequate (if modest) in the early post-WW1 period, but by the end of his life some 40 or so years later he is just barely scraping by, he moves his bed into his kitchen because he can't afford to heat or maintain more than one room in his house, etc. (p. 66). Another recurring character in the story is a mysterious woman named Thora, whose lifespan coincides almost exactly with the narrator's presence on the island, and who saved his life at one point by taking care of him when he had a very bad case of pneumonia (pp. 69–70).

I'm not sure what to make of the title; the wikipedia tells us that Tithonus was a Trojan prince to whom the gods granted eternal life but not eternal youth — a very unfortunate combination. Perhaps the narrator of the present story feels that his life has been stretched out too long as well.

The Fight at Greenay

A very short and rather funny story about a tavern brawl between two groups of men from two neighbouring villages. You can't help but cheer on the visiting team, because it was the locals who picked the fight for no good reason. I particularly liked the ‘what happened next’-style conclusion at the end.

The Cinquefoil

The cinquefoil or potentilla, as I have now learnt from the wikipedia, is a genus of flowers with five petals, and also a related symbol in heraldry and a type of knot in mathematics. The present story consists of five sections, presenting us scenes from the life of the people who live on the small island of Selskay. The sections are closely linked by the fact that the same characters keep recurring again and again, but at the same time each section is told from the perspective of a different person. I thought this was quite a clever device by the writer; the whole thing gives the impression of a rich and intricate tapestry which you have seen from more sides than if it had all been told by a single impersonal narrator.

I was also impressed by the variety of people we meet in this story. There's Mr. Gillespie, the clergyman, who appears on the scene as a bachelor and is promptly besieged by marriage proposals from the more solid local families, but he falls in love with Tilly, a young girl from a decidedly non-respectable family. Eventually such a scandal erupts that he is obliged to resign, moves in with Tilly's family and takes up fishing with one of her brothers.

There's the unfriendly fisherman, Gurness, who has a hard time finding a partner but can't safely operate his boat alone. Near the end of the story he gets into an epic drunken fight with Houton, his former fishing parner, and soon afterwards dies in a boating accident, leaving his property to Houton.

There's Jake Sandside, the wounded Navy veteran, who drinks away his miserable pension and then has to support himself by begging; we follow him on one of his rounds, frustrated by the fact that a rival beggar, a woman named Annie, has visited the same area shortly before him, so he gets much less alms than usual — but then it turns out she has done it for him, and she brings him the whole haul because she had heard he is ill and unable to walk.

There's Rosie, the shopkeeper's daughter, who ignores her father's plans that she should ensnare the clergyman, and marries Houton instead, even at the cost of getting estranged from her father; and we see her being commendably charitable to Jake the sailor.

The Burning Harp

It's Yuletide, 1135, and the good folk of Caithness, on the extreme northeastern tip of Scotland, are practicing their traditional holiday customs: burning down their enemies' houses along with their inhabitants. We are not told why farmer Olaf incurred their wrath, but at least the attackers are considerate enough to allow certain groups of people to escape: women and children; then the priest; and finally, after some consideration, the poet (hence the harp in the title).

Sealskin

This story starts in the 1860s on the small island of Norday, which, judging by some googling, seems to be fictitious and appears in some of Mackay Brown's other work as well (including the last two stories in the present volume). Young Samuel Olafson finds a sealskin on the beach, and later the same day a mysterious naked girl; it is obvious to you or me that she is a seal-woman and can't transform back into seal shape because he took her skin, but for the most part this fact does not seem to occur to the characters in the story. (I remember reading a book about the legends of seal-people in the early days of this blog; see my post from back then.) Simon and his parents take her in, assuming she is a foreign shipwreck victim; she doesn't speak and it's doubtful how much she understands when they speak to her (p. 113).

Unsurprisingly, in due time she gives birth to Simon's child, which causes a certain amount of scandal in the local church community, but they let the couple get married and do not inquire too closely into the girl's background. (One of the locals does suggest that she's a seal-woman, but this is dismissed as irrelevant pagan lore; p. 116.) By this time, she goes by the name Mara and seems to be able to speak English (p. 117); but their marriage grows cold soon.

Some seven years later, Simon brings out the nearly forgotten sealskin that he had put away all those years ago, and gives it to his elderly father as a blanket; unsurprisingly, Mara disappears very soon afterwards, having evidently taken the skin and transformed back into a seal (p. 121–3).

Their son Magnus seems to have a certain fondness for seals (p. 120), but apart from that the human element clearly predominates heavily in him. He goes to school and eventually becomes a composer and conductor of international renown, living it seems mostly on the Continent, and he has many friends in artistic circles (p. 127). He visits Norday again some time after his father's death, but finds that he has grown estranged from the islanders: “An artist must pay dearly, in terms of human tenderness, for the fragments of beauty that lie about his workshop.” (P. 126.)

But his background, as someone coming from a small Orkney island and possibly with some seal-blood in his veins, also influences him. The intellectual discussions with his European friends strike him as ultimately empty: “It was all a game, to keep sharp the wits of people who had not to contend with the primitive terrors of sea and land.” He wonders about the purpose of art, and thinks it might be to oppose the excesses of technological progress: “They [i.e. scientists and engineers] were the new priesthood; the world went down on its knees before every tawdry miracle — the phonograph, the motor car, the machine-gun, the wireless”; the artist's task is “to keep in repair the sacred web of creation — that cosmic harmony of god and beast and man and star and plant — in the name of humanity, against those who in the name of humanity are mindlessly and systematically destroying it.”

This was an interesting and pleasant story, but you might almost say it's two separate stories with too little to link them together: one about Mara the seal-woman, another about Magnus who goes from a childhood on a poor Orcadian island to international fame as an artist. Regarding the first part, I wished we could learn more about Mara's dual nature as a seal-woman, and about how her whole experience of spending so much time on land, giving birth to a human child etc. felt from her perspective. And also, if she prefers to live in the seal shape than in human shape (as seems to be evidenced by how keen she was to return to seal shape as soon as she could get the sealskin back), why do seal-people like her ever transform into human shape to begin with? But I guess the idea is that the story isn't trying to be too much of a fantasy tale and wants to focus firmly on seeing things from the humans' perspective.

And the art vs. science/technology/progress dichotomy at the end is, you might say, just a little too well-worn. Yet well-worn though it may be, it is still true that science and technology, while providing us with much material comfort, have deprived us of a lot of wonder and beauty. Physics and biology as a way of understanding nature have the advantage of being true, but it is idle to pretend that they have the sort of charm that could match that of the legends of the seal people. Let science be content, then, with the pride it can take in being true and useful, and not demand that we should also consider it charming and beautiful, and that we should cease to lament what it has caused us to lose.

The Girl

You might say this is hardly a story, since so little happens in it; it is more of a sketch; but is an enjoyable read nonetheless. We see a group of fishermen working on the beach, and a varied lot they are: old James tarring his boat and telling tales of dubious veracity; young Tom, who is about to emigrate to Canada and who prefers to swim and lounge about rather than help with the work; two other men getting ready to replace a plank; two twins bickering over their inheritance; the coarse Sander Groat and the pious Peter Simison. Meanwhile a girl is watching them from a meadow above and not doing anything in particular except making a wreath out of daisies; at the end of the story someone comes towards her on a motorbike.

It's a pleasant story although I can't say that I have any clear idea what, if anything, we're supposed to make of any of this. Perhaps the idea is that the fishermen represent the past, a way of life that is disappearing, while the girl who “looked down contemptuously at the fishermen” (p. 143) represents the future which will turn towards different ways of life, ways which will be less raw and more comfortable; this would be supported by the motorbike (a symbol of technological progress?) and by the fact that even the youngest of the fishermen is about to abandon their lifestyle by emigrating.

The Drowned Rose

William gets tired of teaching in the big city and accepts a job in a one-room school on the remote island of Quoylay. On his first day there he is visited by a mysterious young woman looking for someone named Johnny, but she disappears as suddenly as she arrived. William soon learns, partly from his new friend the minister and partly from his new neighbour, who is a nosy and malicious gossip, that this is in fact the ghost of Sandra, the previous schoolmistress. Even when not present in visible form, she often manifests herself through cold and the scent of roses.

While alive she was liked by everyone and eventually fell in love with a farmer named John, who unfortunately was still a married man, although his ailing wife has been taken to a hospital in the south some time ago. (She is apparently suffering from the ‘Orcadian disease’, which seems to be a variant of the winter blues; and which struck me as rather surprising given that she is from a neighbouring island herself and thus presumably used to that sort of thing. P. 154.)

Gradually the relationship between Sandra and John began to cause scandal and finally they were found drowned in the sea. The local minister explains that ghosts like hers are souls of the dead who find it difficult to accept their new condition, and thus linger for some time around the places they knew in life and re-enact their past actions, but eventually they move on and fade away.

I really enjoyed this lovely ghost story, though I couldn't help wishing that we learnt more about what really happened. Was their drowning a swimming accident, or did they commit suicide? But they don't seem to have been under *that* much pressure yet.

[This story, incidentally, is also available online: Australian Women's Weekly, 3 November 1971, pp. 79, 90, 93–5.]

The Tarn and the Rosary

This story is a series of sketches following the childhood and youth of a boy named Colm on the island of Norday. Though it is not told in the first person, we do mostly get to see everything from his perspective. Several of the scenes are set at school, where Colm is an uninterested and indifferent pupil, but he eventually finds he has a knack for expressing himself in writing (p. 176). We see his first experience with death, that of his grandfather. He goes on an excursion into the interior of the island and is strangely creeped out by the sight of a deep tarn, or small lake, there (“a sheet of dead pewter”, p. 171), and later finds similar sentiments in a poem by Wordsworth (p. 174).

Colm likes to visit and chat with the local tailor, Jock Skaill, who has a reputation for being an atheist and quite possibly a communist as well; but Jock's glorious rant against progress on p. 179 should bring tears of joy into the eyes of every reactionary.

There's an also interesting scene where Colm's father and other village men are discussing politics and current events (from the references to Ramsay Macdonald and the Irish question we can guess that this is in the interwar period; p. 179); on one particular occasion witnessed by Colm, we see one of the men deliver a grotesquely over-the-top anti-Catholic tirade (p. 182–4) — but perhaps it wasn't over the top by the standards of that time. From my perspective as a non-believer, I may dislike the Catholics but I dislike the Protestants ten times more; at least the Catholics have more picturesque churches, and their clergy wears fancier-looking dresses.

In the last scene of the story, Colm is now a grown-up and makes his living as a writer in Edinburgh. He is still in touch with old Jock, by letter. It turns out Colm has become a very ardent Catholic, for unusually artistic reasons: “my imagination tells me that it is probably so, for the reason that the incarnation is so beautiful. For all artists beauty must be truth” (p. 189). “There is nothing in literature so terrible and moving as the Passion of Christ — the imagination of man doesn't reach so far — it must have been so.” (Ibid.) This reminds me a little of that famous quote from Tertullian, ‘it is probable because it is absurd’, i.e. if someone had made it up he would have made up something more sensible than that :) Here Colm says that it is probably true because if someone had made it up he would have made it up less moving and beautiful; but I wonder if he doesn't underestimate man's imagination.

The Interrogator

This was an amazing and surprising story. The eponymous interrogator (and narrator of the story) arrives at the remote island of Norday; he is investigating the disappearance of a young woman named Vera, and we see him interviewing a series of witnesses who saw Vera on the day she went missing. The interrogator seems to be unhappy with the progress of the investigation, but combining their statements gives us a pretty thorough picture of Vera's movements that day. There's her father, surprisingly unconcerned about her disappearance; there's the boatman who ferried her across the bay from one side of the island to the other; there's Mrs. Moar, who gave Vera some food when she stopped at her farm looking tired; there's the beachcomber who saw her on the beach and later found a skeleton that might have been hers (but that can't be investigated as it has disappeared, presumably washed away by the sea); there's Theodore Hellzie, at whose farm she also stopped, but he was more concerned about his elderly mother who had just had a stroke earlier that day; apparently Vera enquired about a Norwegian fishing boat that was near the island that day, and Hellzie even saw her signalling to it. Perhaps she is not dead after all, but living somewhere in Norway?

And then comes a big surprise. At the end of the day, the beadle who had been conducting the witnesses in and out of the room during the investigation, and who also works as the local gravedigger, says: “I'd better see that they're all safely home, after their outing”, and goes to the churchyard. It turns out that this isn't a detective story after all — it's really a ghost story. Vera disappeared forty years ago, and today's witnesses were all ghosts. The narrator isn't a police investigator as I had imagined, but something more like an exorcist (complete with occasional Latin formulas, though we get them in English translation).

Finally Vera's ghost also appears, wanting to tell the truth about her disappearance; apparently neither she nor the other ghosts can get peace until then. She gives the lie to nearly all the earlier witnesses. Her father kicked her out of the house because she had got pregnant — with Theodore, as it turns out; the boatman tried to molest her; Mrs. Moar shunned her when she knocked at her farmhouse; Theodore refused to take her in, claiming that his mother's stroke was due to her worrying about Theodore's illicit relationship with Vera; and lastly, Vera didn't sail to Norway but simply committed suicide by drowning. The narrator concludes that his investigation is over but “these souls must now pass on to a higher court”.

One thing that I still don't understand, however: Theodore is among the witnesses, and seems to be just as much of a ghost as all the others, since just like them he seems to have no idea that Vera's disappearance was forty years ago. And yet unlike the other witnesses, Theodore is actually still alive (p. 211), though he is an old and shunned man now. How could the interrogator speak to the ghost of a young Theodore while the now-old Theodore is still alive?