The Life of George Mackay Brown: through the eye of a needle Maggie Fergusson John Murray, 330pp, £25 ISBN 0719556597

In October 1964, George Mackay Brown travelled from his home in Orkney to Edinburgh to be recorded talking about poetry. Paralysingly shy, he had to have several whiskies, and on tape, Maggie Fergusson writes, his voice sounds "distinctly slurred". But while Mackay Brown claimed to care nothing for fame or reputation, he did reveal that he would like people - or "the kind of people I was sympathetic towards" - to remember his work "maybe seven or eight or nine generations hence". His use of the word "generations" was characteristic. Mackay Brown's images were rooted in the ancient Orkney language and his imagination was populated by Orcadians living and working in the cycles of the seasons. For him, years - centuries - were marked by the continuity of people rather than by the linear ticking of the clock.

Except for one visit to Oxford when he was nearly 70, Mackay Brown never went south of Edinburgh. And yet, although his images derived from Orkney and the sagas and folk tales of the islands, his themes were large, various and universal. In this outstanding biography, Fergusson uses as her subtitle a working of Seamus Heaney's description of Mackay Brown's poetry: "He transforms everything by passing it through the eye of the needle of Orkney." As a celebrated poet, wealthy enough to go wherever he wished, he chose to stay in the town where he had been brought up. If he wanted a change of scene, he simply went to stay at a farmhouse two miles down the road.

Born in 1921, the youngest son of a postman, Mackay Brown was a late starter. His twenties were racked by the onset of the tuberculosis that weakened him all his life; he began writing by fulminating against modern life in the Orkney Herald. His childhood was rich in the kind of memories that make stories: the terrifying tinkers at the door; a visit with his mother to a croft called Hell, next door to one called Purgatory; outings to visit tombstones.

He travelled to Edinburgh for the first time, at the age of 30, to take up a place at Newbattle College. The warden there was the poet Edwin Muir, a quiet, charismatic, soothing man. Muir's influence and friendship were life-changing. Mackay Brown became a regular of the Rose Street pub, which was the haunt of poets such as Sorley MacLean and Sydney Goodsir Smith. It is one of the many virtues of this biography that the minor characters in the subject's life are so satisfyingly fleshed out. Considering the hermeticism that is so often associated with Mackay Brown, Fergusson's book is bursting with his encounters and friendships. He was by nature an ascetic and by disposition a drinker, especially of whisky: "the smiler with the knife". Though always convivial, he often drank to ward off dark depressions. He fell in love - the great relationship of his life - with Stella Cartwright, the "Muse of Rose Street", and watched her be destroyed by alcoholism; in a brief moment of recovery she became an Avon lady. With her eye for touching detail, Fergusson tells us that Cartwright's last rambling letters to Mackay Brown were sometimes written over a shopping list: "Optrex, cat litter, cigs".

Mackay Brown disliked city life and particularly despised bohemianism, as he saw its blandishments ruin Cartwright. In Edinburgh, he found the "talk of culture absolutely killing". Despite the rumours, he never had the slightest intention of travelling to London when Beside the Ocean of Time was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994. Mackay Brown had a streak of the flinty ruthlessness of the solitary and the writer. He converted to Catholicism - a return, as he saw it, to a spirituality untainted by John Knox's joyless Reformation. He disliked modernity, industrialisation, television (though, in his later years, he enjoyed Countdown). At the end of his life, Fergusson records, Mackay Brown was consoled by the thought that "where the modern hospital sprawled, there had once been nothing more than a clearing in a pine forest, a hut, a well, a hearthstone and two monks".

This is an extraordinarily good book: it is sensitive, witty and has an excellent sense of the vitality of the apparently unimportant details that make up lives and characters. Fergusson also vividly depicts the grand, austere, treeless top-ography of Orkney - without which the life of George Mackay Brown cannot be imagined or understood.

Lucy Lethbridge is literary editor of the Tablet

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