Beside the Ocean of Time, a novel by Geroge MacKay Brown

Brown was born in 1921, in Stromness, Orkney,the son of a tailor and postman; his mother was a Gaelic speaker. Much of his youth was spent in poverty and ill health.  He was unable to fight in the Second World War and spent much of that time in journalism and poetry. After the war he studied at Edinburgh University and came under the influence of Edwin Muir.  He befriended man of the poets of the time, e.g. Norman MacCaig and Hugh MacDiarmid. 

Beside the Ocean of Time is one of his last novels, from 1994, and was listed for a Booker prize.  It relates 800 years of Orkney history as seen through the eyes of a dreamy Scottish schoolboy, whom we see at various points in his life, spent in the Orkneys, in Austria and back, at the end, in his island home.  

A memorable book on account of its sensitive portrayal of  a remote community and the life of the main character. 4*

The Known World, a novel by Edward P. Jones

This formidable book, based on factual information revealed in later academic studies, gives a fascinating insight into slavery in the incompletely formed Southern states of the US in the mid-19th century. A huge range of characters, primarily from one plantation and the adjoining township, appear, each with their own story; these stories are revealed to the reader in short sections, with intriguing (or often irritating) snatches of information about what might happen to them in the future.

The most interesting aspect of the novel is the hierarchy of the characters. They fall into multiple groups: white slave-owners; unusually, black slave-owners, enslaved Negroes, freed slaves, freed slaves who have been illegally re-enslaved, children of mixed race who are slaves, or who are free. The social disparity between these groups of individuals drives the plot, such as it is, as we see how each of them interacts with their neighbours over a period of around 20 years. The novel paints a picture of slavery in the US that is quite different from the traditional presentation, however vivid, of novels like Colston Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad. Overall, however, I found the diffuse storyline quite difficult to stay engaged with — even to remember what had last happened to the characters as they disappeared and reappeared in the plot. But the novel does leave a lasting impression of a complex society that is not often explored in such detail. ***