SOURCE: "Northern Light," in New Statesman & Society, Vol. 7, No. 308, June 24, 1994, p. 39.

In the following review, Roscoe compares Vinland and Beside the Ocean of Time.

John Donne once said in a sermon that if your mind wanders to other places, then that is where you are; you are no longer in the present. Thorfinn, the hero in George Mackay Brown's new novel [Beside the Ocean of Time], spends much of his childhood daydreaming. Through these dreams, Brown is able to dislocate time, mingling the past and the mythology of the Orkneys with the present, the 1920s and 1930s. Each dream is a tale that takes us into another time and world, from Vikings, broch builders and Robert the Bruce to press gangs and the legendary seal folk.

Thorfinn Ragnarson is known on his island of Norday as a "lazy idle useless boy". But his dreams tell us that he...