Here in the heart of Neolithic Orkney, slap bang in the Unesco World Heritage zone, in the middle of an organic farm, it’s a bonny morning. Sheep are grazing, lambs cuddled up. There’s a wee boat on the sea. If you came by for a quick look at the view you’d be forgiven for thinking – rural idyll or what, eh! Bet this place is the perfect spot to write in.
Well, erm. Maybe. Perhaps it’s the perfect place to write gritty urban crime novels or Scots heroin chic; but I tell you, it’s a very hard place to write stories about a small island. Specially when George Mackay Brown has already turned Hamnavoe’s high days, Greenvoe’s holidays, ‘all trades, their gear and tackle and trim’ as his hero Gerard Manley Hopkins put it – into an austere and elegant fable. The thing about fables is that they work whether you are Japanese or Indian, a merchant banker or a midwife. The other thing about them is that they eschew the now, in favour of timelessness. Love, death, God, bread. Great themes. Common to us all.
What about haecceity, though? Being in the moment that’s the real world, real time and place, with all the concomitant messiness and screw-ups, scabrous humour, nasty sex, funny dialect words? Rural grittiness – is that possible? Neil Gunn with more balls?
There’s an exhibition on just now at Southampton Art Gallery called Ancient Landscapes – Pastoral Visions (till June and then travelling, if you’re interested). The press release says the show will ‘affirm the British pastoral tradition,’ ‘tease out worlds of private mystery’. It shows work by the Ancients – Samuel Palmer, who did those creepy but compelling landscapes with Gothic horse chestnut trees in the 1830s and, like Friedrich or Blake, found Nature the best inspiration for expressing complex emotion – then it jumps to Paul Nash and Henry Moore, whose tortured versions of between-war angst are full of thorns and icebergs. So far, so interesting – these painters are experts at conveying unease about the future of a world of tranquil bucolic landscape. But then we jump to the work of a group bizarrely entitled ‘The Brotherhood of Ruralists’, founded in the 70s. If that title makes you think, euch, a bit back-harking, to the Pre-Raphaelites or some proto-fascist organisation which rolls up its left trouser leg on a regular basis and shakes hands through its legs – well, me too. These chaps (no sisters?) are pantheists in the old Romantic tradition, who ‘feel a fraternity or even a unity with rural things.’ Back to the Heartland of N. Orkney and the U. W. Heritage thingy and you see my problem in a nutshell. It looks lovely, my view. But the black flies and clegs are also out this morning. Last night a dozy lamb whose mother won’t bond with it spent from 3 am till 5 am running round the field trying to find her and get a sook. The ‘baa’ was more of a scream of existential despair. Then it gave up and died. Billy the sheepdog, a hapless soul who has more enthusiasm than nouss, keeps getting butted by the other kind of sheep-mother, Mrs Bates from Psycho wearing wool. The farmer and his mates who chased a cow with a prolapse, to try and shove the problem back in and save both, were set upon by tourist wanderers who thought he was being cruel. We have suicides here, folk in such despair that they drive off cliffs. We have drugs. We have an increasingly vitriolic debate about windfarms, oil, sustainable economy for a dwindling, aging island population. We have critics of the kit houses young folk erect because it’s what’s affordable – they’re not ‘vernacular’ enough.
Where does this leave our idea of Orkney? Does the writer edit out the unpleasant – as tour guides are encouraged to, for the thousands of liner visitors who tumble off a ship into a bus? (‘Goodness, there’s a road accident!’ Well, generally our roads are quiet – apart from tour buses – and crime is low. ‘If you look to your left, you’ll see the laird’s house…’) Of course not. A rural writer has a responsibility, nowadays, to describe what art critic Tom Lubbock calls ‘pastoral struggle.’
But it won’t be an easy read. It won’t be an easy write. It won’t be, either, what people want to hear about Orkney – or what publishers want to publish. Orkney the Brand – prime beef, untouched archaeology, locally dived scallops caught between wrecked cars and the remains of divers who got caught in the Scapa Flow wrecks, ‘Irresistible Orkney, YOUR GET AWAY’ is much too strong.
Morag MacInnes is a contributor to two Two Ravens Press anthologies: Riptide and Cleave. She is an Orcadian, a writer, lecturer and community artist.
