Interrogation of Silence: The Writings of George Mackay Brown
Rowena Murray and Brian Murray
(John Murray, £25)

We take greatness for granted in Orkney. World heritage sites are familiar parts of our Sunday strolls, while the flowers beneath our feet may be European rarities.

So we don't think too much about it when we hear that the man in the bar of the Royal Hotel with the happy laugh and the black duffle coat may be a poet. We enjoy his company and share his stories; and then one day it becomes clear that he is someone of world class, whose name ranks with the very greatest of them all.

Now, eight and a half years after George Mackay Brown's death, we can follow the story of how it happened.

The authors, who both knew him so well, are ideal to guide us on the journey, through his life and his writings. Brian Murray combines a deep love of literature with the warmth and care for others that must have made him an inspiring teacher of English to so many pupils.

His daughter, Rowena, has clearly inherited all these fine qualities and is following a distinguished academic career.

So here they show us the seven-year-old George Mackay Brown creating a child's magazine, The Celt, complete with football reports and a science fiction story of The Conquerors from Mercury.

Here he is again, sometime between eight and ten, writing mature prose about an imagined character called Mazurin whose experiences are his own.

The first poem is written when he is 15 or 16 and later published in The Orkney Herald, and it is to The Orkney Herald he goes at the age of 22 when its editor, Jack Twatt, needs a Stromness Correspondent at a time of staff shortage; the year is 1944 and all the reporting staff are in the armed forces.

There he stays at the Herald, for the next seven years, writing the Stromness News, an Island Diary, leader articles, reports of Town Council meetings - and travelling round the Orkney countryside to write descriptive features, painting delightful pictures of the scenery.

"The famous high cliffs that enclose the beach of Rackwick are rose-pink in colour," he writes. "To the left, the beach is fine silver sand; to the right, thousands of huge, almost spherical, rose-red boulders . . .

"Where the clamorous burn went by to the sea, the grass was starred with brilliant yellow marigolds . . ."

While he is acquiring the discipline of the professional writer, his own creative work is starting to grow.

"'I have cultivated this secret vice of poetry for nine years," he says in a letter to Ernest Marwick in May 1946, "and it is my ambition some day to leave one or two really good poems behind me."

The kindness and support of Ernest Marwick - a fellow-member of Jack Twatt's extraordinary team of all the talents at the Herald - was a shining light to the shy young writer. From Ernest he would get comment on his poems, help in typing them out, suggestions for themes, and introductions to other Orkney writers such as Robert Rendall and Christina Costie.

That help was needed so much. Recurrent ill health had turned at the age of 19 into tuberculosis, and Orkney could at times seem claustrophobic. He needed an escape, and Alex Doloughan, the County's Assistant Director of Education, suggested Newbattle Abbey, the adult education college where the Orcadian poet Edwin Muir was Warden.

What a place that was for an aspiring poet! "There was," Edwin Muir observed subsequently, "some faint air of Eden about the place then."

This was a place for true creative work, for discussing ideas, for exploring new themes. It was, wrote George Mackay Brown in later years, "the happiest time of my life". Edwin Muir, he said, had opened a door for him.

The outcome was The Storm, the first book of poems, published in 1954, despite a fresh bout of illness which had forced him to break off his studies at Newbattle and return home.

But he had looked through the door that Edwin Muir had opened and seen the vistas ahead; and whatever obstacles lay in his path, nothing would now prevent his journey.

The wind has fallen, the rain keeps on.

My torn feet on the road
Go quietly, doggedly onward
To emptiness, or God
he writes in 1953, at a time of darkness but yet determination.

Then comes The Storm, marking his emergence as a fully-fledged poet. And after it, a brief return to Newbattle and then four years' study of English at Edinburgh University, followed by two years of postgraduate research on Gerald Manley Hopkins.

Edinburgh brings the joys of the company of kindred spirits, the wonderfully diverse range of writers who drink in Milne's Bar and the Abbotsford in Rose Street.

"Some of the happiest hours of my life have been spent in these two poets' pubs," he would later remark. "Never did the bird of poetry sing so sweet and true!"

Indeed, something of the sparkle of such evenings now seems to come into his work - there certainly is an energy developing in the second book, Loaves and Fishes, in 1959, with poems like Hamnavoe:

The boats drove furrows homeward, like ploughmen
In blizzards of gulls. Gaelic fisher girls
Flashed knife and dirge
Over drifts of herring,

And boys with penny wands lured gleams
From the tangled veins of the flood. Houses went blind
Up one steep close, for a
Grief by the shrouded nets.

Back from Edinburgh in 1964, The Herald has by now closed.

Another good friend, the editor of The Orcadian, Gerry Meyer, has provided encouragement with a commission for a regular weekly column that subsequently becomes Letter from Hamnavoe and then Under Brinkie's Brae in a 35-year-long association with the paper. If ever there was a choice, it is made: the way ahead is to devote his time to his own writing.

Different people will have their views on when the breakthrough was made to national status. I remember for many reasons the year of 1965 and a radio programme which spoke of the two most promising poets of a new generation - "Iain Crichton Smith and George Mackay Brown". And then we heard of an award from the Scottish Arts Council, and a television programme.

We watched in fascination at the scenes of Orkney, where a characteristically modest George had wanted as little as possible of himself to be in the public eye.

He wanted instead to show the island landscape and the houses and farms of the people he knew, and I remember some scenes of Stromness, in the street and in the bar of the Royal, and some fine pictures of the farm of Appiehouse and the Stenness countryside.

On he went, with one book after another - poetry, plays, novels, short stories - and all the time he was going further into the territory that only the very greatest poets can explore.

So at the end of his final anthology of poems, Following a Lark, published just days after his death in the spring of 1996, comes the calm vista from a high place:

Here is a work for poets -
Carve the runes
Then be content with silence

That is the ultimate territory to explore - the silence and the darkness which is not an absence of sound and light or indeed an absence of anything, but the deep elemental place from which all of life and matter springs.

That is the origin of the title of this superb book. Interrogation of silence was for George Mackay Brown, the true task of the poet.

"I am interested in human relationships," he once said, "but in the end it's the solitude which is my destination. I am trying to say something which is almost impossible to say."

He succeeded so well in the attempt.

The writers of this book have distilled a rich mixture of stories and insights and memories, to the extent that every page fascinates.

It simply is a book that every Orcadian, and everyone who loves Orkney, has to have, toread and enjoy again and again.

HNF