Gary Moran on one man's search for self and the spirit of golfthat, for once, manages to avoid cliché and sentimentality.

Several North American authors have journeyed to Scotland with the intention of producing their own slant on the clichéd notion of discovering more about themselves and the true spirit of golf. It is not an easy thing to do well.

There are readers who will never be convinced that 18 holes in sheeting rain with an alcohol-perfumed caddy form part of the game's appeal. Taking 120 shots to negotiate St Andrew's in a gale and then dulling the memory with a few single malts may show a man's true character. It may simply show his folly.

Arnold Palmer's biographer James Dodson overdid the sentimentality as he toured some of the top courses with his ailing father in Final Rounds - a father, a son, the golf journey of a lifetime. The result was too cheesy for our liking.

Michael Bamberger made a decent effort with To The Linksland in which the former tour caddy played some of the lesser-known tracks. One acquaintance of this column read it and expressed an immediate desire to play Machrihanish as soon as possible, preferably in the rain and carrying his own bag. Bamberger must be a better writer than we thought.

For this column we decided to focus on Lorne Rubenstein's A Season in Dornoch. Rubenstein is an award-winning columnist with the Toronto Globe and Mail who was a good enough player to contest the British Amateur in 1977. That was the same year that he first visited Royal Dornoch, the premier links in the Highlands, which is far enough north to have avoided the worst excesses of golf tourism. Most of the village's 1,300 residents play golf and the links is central to all of their lives although they didn't know it was famous until visitors started telling them that it was.

Rubenstein intended to play one round on that first visit but ended up staying for a week. The urge to return never fully left him, although it did take him 23 years to go back. Credit Rubenstein that he didn't take half measures and brought over his non-golfing wife and rented a flat in the village for three months.

Other than wanting to write a book, Rubenstein wanted to escape a life full of detail, daily lists as long as a three-iron, in touch all the time via mobile phone, fax and e-mail. Some of the joy had also gone from his game. He worked on his swing only because an important round was coming up. Play had transmuted into effort, effort into work. Inexorably, he'd stopped playing for playing's sake.

Dornoch was the right place to reverse the process. In their premier tournament, the Carnegie Shield, the club's 79-year old vice-president Andrew McLeod acted as Rubenstein's caddy. The retired housepainter looped four or five times most weeks. Rubenstein, himself, played alone or in groups at six in the morning or nine in the evening. He contested the Captain's Pink Balls at nearby Golspie and the Curate's Egg at Brora. He just did what felt good.

The book is not solely about himself and his game. For example, there are sections on linksland preservation, highland music and the Clearances which saw the indigenous population leave the land. Certainly there are resonances for some of Ireland's linksland villages.

Shaking hands with the flagstick at the end of a v-par competition was a bit schmaltzy but at least the five-handicap Rubenstein admits to more than a few hours of depression after shooting 91-86 in the Carnegie Shield. Whether it's Myrtle Beach or the Highlands, there is simply nothing like good play to warm a golfer's heart.

A Season In Dornoch by Lorne Rubenstein