As with many nature-centric memoirs of recent years, Marianne Brown’s debut, The Shetland Way, begins with personal loss. It opens at the funeral of her father, Bill, on his home island of Shetland, a place she knows only in glimpses; her parents separated when she was two, and her relationship with her father was characterised by absence, “always promising something it would never deliver”. But her connection with the islands and her late father is forced into an accelerated intimacy; the funeral takes place in February 2020 as the pandemic spreads, and Brown finds herself unexpectedly spending the months of lockdown with her partner and young daughter in Shetland: “Confinement in a land that claimed half my genealogy, a history and culture of which I knew next to nothing about.”
They stay in the house that Bill, a potter, had built alongside the ruins of his grandparents’ croft, an immediate and constant reminder of the complex layers of history written into the islands’ very landscape. In the 1970s, oil wealth changed the fortunes of Shetland, but it’s impossible to forget that Brown’s own family, like most of their neighbours, are only a few generations away from the precarious life of crofters, at the mercy of unpredictable weather, crop blight and unscrupulous lairds, a relatively recent history of emigration and starvation. There is an awareness among the islanders that, despite the presence of Sullom Voe, one of Europe’s largest oil terminals, the “black gold” is a finite resource; the more forward-thinking have accordingly turned their attention to the one thing Shetland is unlikely to run out of: wind.
