Flamingo, 1995, 219 p.

This is a chronicle of life in the Orcadian island of Norday in the years between the World Wars till just after the Second. But it is also a collection of short stories.

Thorfinn Ragnarson is a dreamer. His teacher, Mr Simon, says he can’t seem to teach the boy anything and his father says he’s not good at farm work either. At one point he seems to be channelling Dad’s Army’s Captain Mainwaring when he refers to Thorfinn as, “You stupid boy.”

Not much gets past the islanders. Many of their conversations take place in the island’s shop and post office.

Thorfin has an imagination, though, letting it run wild through history, which is where the short story aspect of the novel comes in. We read his reminiscences of Vikings on the road to Byzantium, a dilapidated knight and his squire travelling to the battle of Bannockburn, the experience of the inhabitants of one of the then new-fangled brochs, an ancestor taking Mara, a selkie woman, as a wife.

Meanwhile, Mr Drummond, the new Minister, surprises the community by being unmarried and letting the Manse fall into grubbiness, scandalises some by, once, treating the men in the pub to a round before inviting them to church and having a young female arrive to stay with him at the Manse. She is taken to by the local ‘person of quality,’ Mr Harcourt-Smithers, riding his horse all over the island. It is not until she is leaving that her relationship to Drummond is revealed. She has nevertheless fired Thorfinn’s imagination again.

The outside world (and impending war) intrudes when government men arrive to survey the land for an aerodrome, whose impact will change the island forever.

The last chapter, Fisherman and Croftwoman, sees the return of Thorfin to the island after being in a POW camp for most of the war (where he began writing, using his earlier daydreams as source material) and of Sophie, a childhood acquaintance, to take the inheritance of a nearby croft.

Like most Scottish literature Beside the Ocean of Time is about loss and change; but it is also about what endures, what makes a community, and acceptance.

Pedant’s corner:- “less worries” (‘fewer worries’ but it was in reported speech so probably true to the speaker,) “Johnny Walker” (the whisky: it’s ‘Johnnie Walker’.)