Today, after over 250 years of publishing, John Murray Press launch their John Murray Classics imprint, with each new edition of these classic texts introduced by a well-known fan. Find Amy Liptrot’s brand new foreword to George Mackay Brown’s ‘Beside the Ocean of Time’ extracted below.
Beside the Ocean of Time was George Mackay Brown’s last novel, written when he was seventy and published in 1994, a couple of years before his death. On the fictional Orkney island of Norday in the 1930s, crofter’s son Thorfinn Ragnarson, called in the opening sentence ‘the laziest and most useless’ boy on the island, fantasizes himself into history as a Viking traveller, a knight’s companion at Bannockburn, a member of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s fighters, and into the future as a prisoner in a German camp in the Second World War, but always returning to Norday. The book is ambitious, fluid and a distillation of both the essence of Orkney and of Mackay Brown’s body of work.
Like GMB – he is often known simply by his initials – I am a writer from Orkney, yet surprisingly I am a newer fan of his writing. As a teenager I resisted anything I was told to like, in particular anything from Orkney, my view cast further south over the horizon. I have come to him slowly as an adult, gradually seeing the quality of his writing and endurance of his subjects, and only read Beside the Ocean for the first time last summer, picked up from Orkney Library. On the warmest day of the year, I sat on the sofa in the sun and, as the children played in the garden, I had a relaxing and pleasurable reading experience, utterly transported.
The book came to me at the right time, when I was living on the non-fictional Orkney island of Papay, population 80. Papay bears many similarities with Norday, “from the lowest stone in the ebb to the topmost cairnstone on the summit of Fea”, with its two big houses – the laird’s hall and the manse – the hub of the shops, the crofters and fishermen, the beachcomber and the gravedigger. I imagined the island Norday as Papay, and furthermore the main croft in the book – Ingle – as the particular renovated croft on the east shore where I was staying. One dreamy chapter, ‘The Press-Gang and the Seal-Dance’, brings in folklore, the only section to do so, as easily and factually as if it was part of conventional history. Here, Thorfinn Ragnarson of Ingle steals a selkie – a seal that can take human form – from the beach to become his wife. The wife eventually returns to the sea, leaving the crofter with five bairns to bring up.
As I was reading, I remembered with chills the census records about the Papay house. In the census of 1851, a married couple John and Mary Mainland were living at the croft with three children 10, 6 and 2. Ten years later, in 1851, it was just John and five children, the youngest of them 6. I am not saying definitively that Mary Mainland was a selkie, but if the selkie-lives-on-land tales were to be true, this croft right beside a beach would be the perfect place for it. It is close enough to hear the seals sing, and I imagined a sealskin hidden for years in one of the byres. I mention this coincidence to show that, although fanciful, the book has a veracity – it is alive, giving connections into the next century.
I copied out one paragraph, two sentences, into my diary, which I found beautiful and exemplary:
A wave in the Sound – one of those seventh waves that comes in higher and colder and more rampant than the six ordered predictable waves on either side of it – crashed against the round ancient ruin on the shore, and carried away another stone that had stood for twelve centuries. That stone would trundle here and there with the tides, flung back and fore in the mill of the ocean for a few decades, growing smaller and ever more spherical, until it was at last a scattering of sand among the oyster grains and the grains of crab and cormorant.
These fluent lines, both oceanic and specific, on entropy, show us GMB’s themes of the links through time, and the elements and heritage of Orkney. Although he doesn’t write in Orcadian dialect, he uses words in Orkney specific usage: ‘Sound’, a stretch of water between islands; the ‘ebb’ as a place and a process, ringing out perfectly. I recommend his poetry collection Following A Lark, written around the same time, as a companion piece.
This book could be chosen as an alternative introduction to Orkney history. The chapter ‘Broch’ made me think about the function of brochs – still in debate by historians but shown here convincingly as protecting islanders from invasion. It offers insight into both history and folklore. The account of villagers forced up to live in the hills by seafaring settlers made me wonder about the origins of stories about hillyans and trowies, mischievous beasties, similar to trolls, who live in the rough higher ground.
As a child, I remember seeing GMB around Stromness, the harbour town where he lived all his life and where I went to school, likely pointed out by my parents. I reflect now on how having a great poet as a member of our community, popping to the shop, made the life of a writer seem possible. Now, I am encouraged as a writer and a human by someone writing his most successful book at the end of his life. It was Booker-nominated, beaten to the prize by another Scottish novel, James Kelman’s How Late it Was, How Late, and won Saltire Scottish Book of the Year.
I am also encouraged by a writer returning to similar subject matter and structure, honing and expanding. The structure of Beside the Ocean is similar to that of his children’s book, Six Lives of Fankle the Cat, published in 1980, which I read as a child and have recently read to my own children with the main character, in this case a cat, travelling through history and having adventures – Fankle is a sketch for Thorfinn. From his first novel Greenvoe, published in 1972, we encounter another small island community under threat from an industrial project. The character of the outcast is encountered repeatedly in his short stories and, like An Orkney Tapestry, GMB’s only work of ‘non-fiction’, Beside the Ocean is a free-flowing, expansive tour through Orkney history.
In all these ways, Beside the Ocean of Time represents a culmination of George Mackay Brown’s themes, and as well as being his most successful book it is probably his best and most unified. It depicts a total integration of imagination and history, with the dreamer reaching his full poetic potential, blurring the boundaries between dream and reality.
Amy Liptrot, 2025
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The initial 10 John Murray Classics titles are out now, including George Mackay Brown’s ‘Beside the Ocean of Time’ introduced by Amy Liptrot, David Attenborough’s ‘Adventures of a Young Naturalist’ introduced by Dara McAnulty, and Andrea Wulf’s ‘The Invention of Nature’ introduced by Merlin Sheldrake. See the full list here.