Deep Wheel Orcadia by Harry Josephine Giles
Review by Claire Carroll
Our sense of distance has taken on a new significance this past eighteen months. Our world has been a mirror-maze of ever compressing space, ever expanding time. Lockdown days stretched out into oblivion, friends we hadn’t touched or held in months seemed simultaneously available, just on a screen, just out of reach. Harry Josephine Giles’ novel Deep Wheel Orcadia is a literary work whose life predates the Covid-19 pandemic; it follows a period of meticulous research of the Orcadian language by Giles, one of Scotland’s most original contemporary poets. Nevertheless, it feels apt that we should emerge from such a strange and unprecedented time, with a literary phenomenon whose strangeness and stark beauty seem to capture many of the complicated feelings—about loss, home, distance, and longing—that are left in the wake of the pandemic.
Deep Wheel Orcadia is a novel like no other. It is presented in verse, in Orcadian, the dialect spoken in the Orkney Islands, where Giles is from. The main narrative runs alongside an English translation, in which Giles carefully reproduces, not just the meanings of the Orcadian words, but their sound, their music, their weight. In so doing she creates new words in English: waitstayliving, groundworldsoil, humtunesongwail, and countless others. This technique of not only presenting a novel in a dialectical language, but also dynamically restructuring its translation is so fresh and unprecedented as to feel exhilarating. It’s possible that in a different pair of hands, the readerly challenge posed by such a style might overwhelm. In fact, the opposite is true. Some quiet, alchemical magic happens in the space between the Orcadian and the English translation, where the sense of place, the characters and their hopes, fears, losses and loves takes over. The world of Deep Wheel Orcadia is enveloping, welcoming. This magic is arguably the result of Giles’ highly regarded dexterity as a poet, but this novel has pushes into a new realm, evidence that Giles is a visionary for the future of language itself.
The world of Deep Wheel Orcadia in one of pasts and futures that have become enmeshed. The space station hangs in the darkness, its inhabitants leave and return, fall in love, argue, dance, and worry about the future. The musicality of the verses offers a sense of motion, a slow turning that is physical as well as metaphorical. The characters’ lives feel familiar, and yet, they inhabit a world beyond our understanding. This familiar-strangeness is omnidirectional; the characters converse in an ancient dialect that has been used for centuries, whilst eating protein soup and discussing space voyages.
The central narrative follows a cast of characters, including Astrid, a student returning home after studying on Mars, and Darling who is searching for a place to belong. Their story is rife with longing and intimacy which feels infinitely relatable to the contemporary human experience. The pain of searching for something that feels like home, the joy of finding solace in another being, is deeply poignant. Darling wonders, as she lies next to a sleeping Astrid: What must it mean, to only know your body when it’s with another? And does it ever mean anything other than grief?
At the novel’s conclusion, Darling, Astrid and the other characters seem to be on a precipice of deeper forms of discovery, leaving the reader to contemplate how an individual’s sense of self intersects so palpably with their sense of home; how a search for peace and belonging, both internally and externally, is infinite. Deep Wheel Orcadia feels like a novel with a life of its own, that will reveal new parts of itself with each reading. What is perhaps most striking, though, is the way in which Giles demonstrates that language has the power to help us reimagine our ideas of community and identity, simultaneously reaching back to hold on to the past, and forward to grasp the future.
Deep Wheel Orcadia is published by Picador, 14th October 2021