George Mackay Brown and the Scottish Catholic Imagination by Linden Bicket (review)

Few writers are as closely associated with a particular place as George Mackay Brown. For many readers he remains, as Eric Linklater wrote in 1971, 'essentially a poet of Orkney'. As such, the majority of critical responses to Brown's work have either explored Brown's connection with Orkney or attempted, in various ways, to challenge the centrality of Orkney to his writing. Linden Bicket's excellent new volume, however, sidesteps the question almost entirely, persuasively placing Brown in a larger context of Scottish Catholic writing. Through extensive use of letters and unpublished manuscripts, as well as more canonical texts, Bicket convincingly demonstrates the centrality of Catholic material to Brown's corpus. Brown's importance as a Catholic writer, Bicket argues, is not limited to his use of particular stories and images, but is also tied to a larger sense of the sacramental function of literature. As such, George Mackay Brown and the Scottish Catholic Imagination reinvigorates the critical discourses surrounding Brown's work, and offers a new approach to his texts that will influence any future criticism.

The monograph's importance and appeal, however, extends far beyond the world of Brown scholarship. Especially in the substantial introduction, Bicket makes an excellent case for the importance of recovering 'the forgotten literary Catholicism of a Calvinist country' (p. 2). Scottish Catholic writing, Bicket demonstrates, is not limited to pre-Reformation works or texts produced by the Irish in Scotland (or even Muriel Spark), but constitutes a rich if unacknowledged tradition. The enthusiastic analysis of George Scott-Moncrieff's little-known Death's Bright Shadow (1949) will send many readers in search of a copy, while similar discussions of A. J. Cronin, Bruce Marshall, and George Friel, as well as Spark, are fascinating both in their own right and as steps to the formation of a Scottish Catholic canon. The importance placed on the Reformation by Edwin Muir and Hugh Mac-Diarmid, Bicket argues, has had the effect of producing an overly-essentialist account of Scottish cultural and religious identity; one of the chief merits of this book is in drawing attention to other voices which have sometimes been dismissed.

Especially in the case of Brown, as Bicket makes clear, the Catholic imagination is not simply an intermingling of text and faith, but allows 'for fresh interpretations of very old forms, stories, characters, and narrative techniques' (p. 176). Brown's perceived conservatism and distrust of modernity, his use of intertextuality and anachronism, and his emphasis on ritual are all in service of a broader vision. This combination of religious and textual scholarship is made especially important in the monograph's second chapter, which examines Brown's autobiography For the Islands I Sing (1997) in relation to other autobiographical material, both published and unpublished, as well as Spark's Curriculum Vitae (1992). Many critics have found both Brown's and Spark's volumes perplexing: they are curiously unrevealing, and have mostly been supplanted by other biographical works. As Bicket shows, however, For the Islands I Sing is dense with intertextual reference, not least to John Henry Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua. If the volume is notably lacking in detail about Brown's conversion to Catholicism, Bicket argues, its formal echoes of a long tradition of spiritual self-writing are key to understanding both Brown's self-conception and his writing practice. The chapter's integration of published autobiographical writing, unpublished early work, and autobiographical fiction is exemplary: it not only recuperates the reputation of an under-examined volume, but is likely to remain the definitive analysis of Brown's Catholicism.

The remaining chapters of the monograph focus on the consistent use of Catholic imagery and hagiography in Brown's corpus, looking respectively at the role of Mary, St Magnus, and the nativity of Christ in his work. While Brown's repeated focus on Magnus has frequently been acknowledged, Bicket makes the case that his Marian writings, often unpublished, occupy an...