Time in a Red Coat

Book by Brown, George Mackay

The award-winning Scots poet and novelist has fashioned a picaresque parable, ranging in time and space from the China of Genghis Khan to the Orkney Islands today. The heroine, an Eastern princess, is fated to wander eastward throughout Europe following armies and war until she reaches the sea. Mackay Brown's narrative mixes the somewhat fey phrases of ritual and myth with naturalism and actual history to dramatize the horrors of war and man's increasing proficiency at it. But, despite his obvious gift for language and characterization, he succeeds neither in making an effective statement, nor in rousing our interest; even the long-awaited ending is flat and anticlimactic. An interesting, flawed effort. Shelley Cox, Southern Illinois Univ. Lib., Carbondale
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.