The Shetland Way by Marianne Brown review: 'much to enjoy and much to chew upon'

Marianne Brown | Léonie Hampton

Books about Shetland used to be quite rare, some having only local publication and a local readership. Things are different now; this is the fourth or fifth that has come my way in recent months. Some are the work of incomers, others of people with deep roots in Shetland. No doubt the internet with all it offers in the way of material and communication accounts to some extent for the change. It is only physically that Shetland can be called "remote" and this of course invites the question "remote from where?"

Marianne Brown was living in Devon, editing an environmental magazine when news of her father's death brought her back to Shetland. She had spent childhood holidays there, while living the rest of the year with her mother in Edinburgh, but the funeral caused her to return, along with her husband and four year-old daughter, and then Covid and lockdown kept them there. The early chapters of the book deal with the author’s recovery of Shetland language and lore, and also the pleasure her daughter took in island life.

For Brown, a journalist committed to promoting means of combatting climate change, Shetland is as important now as it was 50 years ago, in a very different economic and political climate, for the extraction of oil and gas from the North Sea. And, just like the oil industry, the renewables industry also seems to carry a danger of destroying the Shetland way of life.

It was capitalism - in the shape of the great oil companies - that both promised rewards and threatened damage to the culture of Shetland half a century ago, and now in pursuing the means of dealing with climate change while also looking to make a profit, capitalism once again presents Shetland with a mixture of dangers and opportunities.

So, Brown looks back as well as forward. Oil money in Shetland wasn't frittered away. Instead Ian Clark, the chief executive of the Shetland Islands Council, did a deal whereby an oil fund was established from which Shetlanders would gain long-term advantage. Brown offers one small but nicely spotted example of this. In her father's youth, boys and girls didn't learn to swim: the sea was too cold and anyway few fishers swam. Thanks to the oil fund, however, swimming pools were built for even small, rural schools. A small thing perhaps, but important.

Now mighty pylons will stalk across the land, carrying energy to the Central Belt of Scotland, but also disrupting island life, culture and ecology, a greater disturbance indeed than was threatened by the oil companies. Can the new providers of energy be tamed?

Much of the second half of Brown's book consists of records of her conversations with people on either side of the argument. This is as it should be, and one can add only that similar arguments are breaking out over much - perhaps even most - of rural Scotland, where landscapes are threatened with brutal transformation and lives disturbed for the benefit of people far away from the disturbance, as well as for whatever such developments may do to arrest climate change. Consequently, this book has a relevance that goes well beyond Shetland.

The Shetland Way is no polemic; nor is it all concerned with the threat of climate change and how this should be met, though some readers will doubtless find these the most engaging parts of the book. Others will get more of interest - and certainly of pleasure - from Brown's descriptions of daily life in the northern village where her father lived, the passages on Shetland folklore, and the observations about Shetland’s language and history. In short, this is a book which offers much to enjoy and much to chew upon.

The Shetland Way, by Marianne Brown, The Borough Press, £16.99.