Harry Josephine Giles, ‘Deep Wheel Orcadia’ (2021)

 

A science-fiction novel-in-verse, written in Orcadian—the dialect of the author’s native Orkney—with a translation into English running along the bottom. That's a pretty tasty prospect, I'm sure you'd agree: and in many ways the book passes that taste-test. And actually my opening sentence, there, is wrong in several respects. Giles’s book is a novella not a novel, the idiom of the poem is not a ‘dialect’ but a language (it's an important distinction) and the foot-of-the-page translation is not exactly English. But it is science-fiction: a story about a group of visitors to a deep-space space-station, the titular wheel turning slowly amongst the stars. The business of this place is to harvest a fuel named ‘Light’. Astrid has been in ‘the big city’—a colonised Mars—and is returning to the place she grew up. On the same ship as her are two English speakers (Noor, an archaeologist studying a mysterious alien artefact, and a man on the run called Darling). The station, in other words, is like an island, like Orkney, and the story manages the parallels pretty well. 

Then again, it's not entirely accomplished. The SF elements feel a little derivative, even rote: the time paradoxes entailed by faster-than-light travel, the space-whales, even the 2001-spinning-wheel of the space station itself, all over-familiar and sketched rather than fully developed. Some of the characters aren't very rounded. The ending feels rushed. But there are moments of real descriptive vividness, and it earns its status as a poem: the form feels right, not (as it might be) a gimmick, and the book as a whole is memorable and worthwhile. You should read it.

I went to Aberdeen University as an undergraduate in 1984. Before I went up I had assumed that Scots is a dialect of English. It’s not: Scots is a language in its own right, as I learned in my first-year linguistics lectures. It has many similarities with English (or English has with Scots) because they both descend from a common ancestor. But talk of ‘dialect’ subordinates one to the other, and isn't correct. Then again, canons of orthography and spelling for English were more rigorously determined than for Scots, which was a language for much of its history spoken by a largely illiterate population. That means that to write Scots involves a greater degree of latitude than is the case with English.

I suppose the most famous Scots poet is Burns, but the best Scots poet is Hugh MacDiarmid, the pen name of C M Grieve. MacDiarmid invented a ‘synthetic Scots’, sometimes called Lallans, combining various forms of Scots both vernacular and archaic, forging an idiom in which he could write his verse. Giles is doing something similar in this book, although in a less systematic way.

Another memory of arriving at university in the 1980s is discovering that though a return ferry ticket from Aberdeen to Orkney cost several hundred pounds, a return ferry ticket from Orkney to Aberdeen was only a tenner; a subsidy by the government was in place to encourage people from the islands to come to the mainland to, for instance, go to university. What this meant was that young people on the island would buy a ticket, come to the city, sell the return half at the mainland going-rate and get roaring drunk on the proceeds. Happy times.

Not to get distracted. I mean no disparagement when I suggest Deep Wheel Orcadia is written in Synthetic Scots. On the contrary: MacDiarmid was one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. And there is a Synthetic Scots tradition in SF too: actor James Doohan, of Northern Irish stock, born and raised in Canada, affecting his hoots-mon pantomime accent to play ‘Scotty’ Scott, the Scottish engineer of the Starship Enterprise: ‘the ingines cannae tek it, capn!’ and so on. Giles is considerably more sophisticated and expressive than that. This is how the poem starts:

Easy enough to read, even for a non-Scot. Indeed, the language in which the poem is written is less Lallands, and more a (slightly inconsistent) phonetic transcription of spoken Scots, like Irvine Welsh’s Transpotting, or indeed Banks’s Feersum Enjinn. That’s fine, and often works well. I was less enamoured of the ‘English’ translation, which renders often perfectly simple Scots words into Gerard Manley-Hopkins clusters of synonyms, Joyce-like or else just a tangle.

The logic here, I suppose, is that translation from one language to another is never a process of one-to-one mapping. I don’t gainsay that, but actually in this case the two languages (Orkney Scots and English) are pretty proximate in many ways, and the English splurges read as chaff, or a kind of over-compensation: turntwistwhirlspinning againstaboutbefore is a mess, not an expressive rendering of turlan anent. Often the juxtaposition of Scots and Hopkins-English works to suggest that the former is a more concise, to-the-point, punchier language than the sprawling, flailing latter:

Stuart Curran, reviewing the book in The Scotsman, notes:

Although the book contains its own justification – “sheu hears thir vooels roondan, thir consonants clippan / thir wirds switchan” – and often English intrudes when the vocabulary is simply not there – “Ma coseen is wi a college / roon Alpha Centauri, wirkan / wi archives o 21st century / intertextual narrative” – the problematic part is the difference between phonology and orthography. Why do these space-Orcadians say (or write) “arkaeolojist” and “ruinaetion” rather than “archaeologist” or “ruination”, “taks” for “takes” or “injines” for “engines”? I can understand the use of dwam, smirr, watergaw, on-ding, hae for have gie for give, but I’ve never known anyone insist on “crampit, caald offiece” rather than “cramped, cold office”. It may make the lilt of the language more apparent, but it can seem like difference for the sake of difference.

That’s right, I think. More, the peculiar orthography and the need to incorporate technical and other jargon into the story leads, sometimes, to verse of rebarbative ugliness. Here, for instance, two characters discuss the ‘new teknolojy’ of hyperdrive:

“Whit wey deus hid work?” asks Eynar, pooran
a beer “A’m no sure,” says Olaf,
“but yin arkaeologist, ken, ach,
whit’s her name, telt his like this—”

The jumpit yoleman taks twa glesses
an a pock o nuts an steers
this subtle injines trou the warp
o time, noo rings o spirit on

the binkled aluminium bar.
“The drive maks a pock, see,
O hyperspace tae win trou,
Tae exceed relatievistic constraints.”

“Ya, but,” says Eynar, “I thowt his wis
more ontolojiecal restrictions
as teknolojiecal limits. Whit wey
ir thay avoydan catastrophic

temporal paradox, eh?” Olaf
taks a drowt o his ael an says
“Ya weel. Best kens. An best kens
thay maan, fer hid’s bad enough tae loss

the laast bit o the laast bit
o wir shippeen ithoot messan wi fuckan
multiversal anomalies
an aa.”

The lines that work here as poetry, as Wordsworth might have said, are the ones describing simple, everyday sights or actions: rings o spirit on/the binkled aluminium bar; Olaf takking a drowt o his ael. The rest is lumpen, awkward, ungainly. It’s hard to see what ‘Whit wey deus hid work’ has over ‘Whit way does hit work’, or indeed ‘Whit way does hit woruk’ (the ‘English’ translation gives us: ‘whathowwherewhy does it work?’, over-egging the simpler original—where does it work? What kind of question is that? Why does it work? What?). The use of ‘subtle’ breaks the phonetic logic of the whole—or is the idea that Orcadians pronounced that word ‘sub-tlee’?—and ‘I thowt his wis/more ontolojiecal restrictions/as teknolojiecal limits’ is just ugly.

Curran's line, in the Scotsman review I quote above, is that experiments are worth undertaking but that not every experiment works. That Deep Wheel Orcadia doesn't entirely work doesn't mean that it's not worthwhile, or doesn't deserve its place on the Clarke shortlist (I think it does), or that you shouldn't read it. But it is a text of promises more than it delivers. The wheels in deep space go round and round, round and round, round and round.