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Deep Wheel Orcadia: A Novel

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The question I'd like to ask is "Why do you write in English?" Inwith and outwith the grand and sprawling beast of that international language are many other tongues and possibilities. The commonplace monolingualism of these islands is false and forced: everyone carries multiple ways of speaking within them. Unearthing languages in the present and growing them into the future is a demand and a joy. It follows Astrid who is returning home from art school on Mars, and Darling, who is fleeing a life that never fits. The pair meet on Deep Wheel Orcadia, a distant space station struggling for survival as the pace of change threatens to leave the community behind.

A young woman who's studying in the more urbane society of Mars struggles to navigate her identity and her belonging. An undoubtedly beautifully written book, and a fascinating reading experience. It does however leave some things to be desired, particularly where plot and to a lesser extent worldbuilding are concerned. How important these elements actually are to the overall experience of reading the book may vary from reader to reader; for myself I was definitely left wanting.Deep Wheel Orcadia’ is a first book written in Orkney dialect (or Orcadian) in over fifty years. However, please do not feel discouraged by this notion, as there is a translation provided. As a person living in Orkney (but not coming from Orkney), I was grateful for the translation, but as I got into the swing of reading the original, I felt I needed the translation less and less. So someone on here recommended I gives this a try, and having read it I’m flattered that they thought I was sufficiently cultured to get that much out of it. Or better to say that I appreciated it as, like, a concept or an art object more than I enjoyed it as a story or as a work of literature? Along the way we also meet Astrid’s father Oyvind, Eynar the local bar owner, Noor the scientist, Olaf the ship’s captain, and a host of other entertaining and often slightly bizarre characters. Through them all you get a snapshot of the daily struggles and doubts, as people make everyday decisions that keep their community alive, while some wonder where the community will be in the years ahead. Whether their community will die or change, and whether there's a different between the two. Thankfully Giles also provides a plain English translation alongside the Orcadian text so that you don’t have to sit with an Orcadian dictionary at hand. This makes the experience of reading it somewhat akin to watching a foreign language movie with subtitles. In this translation they also provide a concatenated version of every possible option when a word doesn’t translate exactly into English.

The Guardian called the book "a book of astonishments". [7] The Orkney News made favourable comparisons between elements of the story and life on Orkney, such as bad internet speeds, but felt the ending was unsatisfying and the cast list excessive. [8] The book is split into three parts, and in the first one, there is a clear portrayal of a struggling community: people working to make ends meet and food being scarce, while on the other hand, some searching for their identity and their place in the world. Merritt, Mike (10 January 2022). "Author Harry Josephine Giles pulls novel from Highland Book Prize in protest against all-white shortlists". The Times . Retrieved 27 October 2022.

To call this something of an unusual book would be an understatement. Giles is a poet who works primarily in the Orcadian dialect, the local language of the Orkney Islands. It’s kind of a mixture of English, Scots dialect words and old Norse. Despite being subtitled “a novel” this book is written in verse and in this dialect. Surprisingly, the Orkney is not that difficult to read. I read this twice, reading both the English and Orkney, with a good deal of the Orkney aloud. I am more engaged with the politics of the translation than the actual story itself, though the story is fine. I just think it should go on more. It seems too short and unfinished to be called a novel, as the cover of my copy does. It is also described as verse, and may be verse in the Orkney, but does not seem to be in verse in the English. Matthew Fitt Deep Wheel Orcadia is a mysterious and moving novel in verse about finding home in the farthest reaches. Giles lifts us to new worlds, in space and in language, we could never have imagined. A singular and numinous work The wheel has always been inhabited by the descendants of the Orcadian people, and their lifestyle echoes that of the Orkneys. Their economy is dependent of “fishing” for “lights”, a kind of superfuel that powers faster than light travel, which is found in the atmospheres of gas giants. They also harvest hulks, what appear to be alien spacecraft found trapped in the gravity well of the huge planet. I started out slow, but it grew on me as I progressed. The passages of Orcadian are just short enough that you can skim between it and the "translation". I enjoyed the multiplemanyvaried style that the translation used where it had lost the meaning of a word. The story itself was interesting enough, but I stayed (quietly mouthing orcadian to myself) for the unique writing style.

For more information on the history of the ‘Harvest Home’, you can read more here: https://theorkneynews.scot/2020/12/08/the-harvest-home/ Sampson, Fiona (1 October 2021). "The best recent poetry – review roundup". the Guardian . Retrieved 30 October 2022. A space odyssey science fiction novel written in the Orcadian dialect in the form of an epic poem, if this isn’t enough to sell it to you read on. Harry Josephine Giles is a writer and performer from Orkney, living in Edinburgh. Their collection ‘Tonguit’ was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and The Games for the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award and Saltire Prize for Best Collection. They have a strong spoken word scene presence – they were the 2009 BBC Scotland slam champion, and their theatre has also toured globally, including Forest Fringe (UK), NTI (Latvia), Verb Festival (Aotearoa) and Teszt (Romania).One of the most beautiful books I have ever read, Deep Wheel Orcadia is a science fiction poem written in the Orkney dialect. Because this is primarily a spoken language, Giles must render the speech into recognizable form while preserving the character of the spoken word—no mean feat. Orkney is derived from Scots, but also contains the influence of the Norse, making it unique and musical. a b Kelly, Stuart (15 October 2021). "Book review: Deep Wheel Orcadia, by Harry Josephine Giles". The Scotsman . Retrieved 29 October 2022. It’s as if language itself becomes the book’s hero and the genre is all the richer for it,” he added. Reading Deep Wheel Orcadia is a rich experience of interpretation and translation on multiple connected levels. The quote above gives you 'kist' and 'sleeping-chestcoffinbreast' for the place where a character is sleeping in her room on the space station. These options leave an area for the reader's imagination to fill, while making them more aware of this process of interpretation and visualisation from context. They delineate an area for interpretation in a way that a single word would not. I've never read a book that unveiled and examined the process of sci-fi linguistic world-building in this way before and found it riveting.

Overall, this is a beautifully written book. I loved the poetic nature of its verses. Saying that, I felt there were far too many characters to form a connection with any of them – maybe that was the purpose, but for me, when I am reading a story, I like to feel some sort of emotional inkling. Also, the book doesn’t really have a proper ending. Again, that also could have been done purposely, but I felt as if the characters were just abandoned somewhere in space, circling the orbit. Since I’m of a certain age and Scottish my first read of this was in the way it was originally set out, as an epic poem in Orcadian, and? For the most part I could understand what was written and in this form it was really satisfying, only rarely having to pop down to see the english translationinterpretationmeaning of the words used.

Deep Wheel Orcadia is a magical first: a science-fiction verse-novel written in the Orkney dialect. This unique adventure in minority language poetry comes with a parallel translation into playful and vivid English, so the reader will miss no nuance of the original. The rich and varied cast weaves a compelling, lyric and effortlessly readable story around place and belonging, work and economy, generation and gender politics, love and desire – all with the lightness of touch, fluency and musicality one might expect of one the most talented poets to have emerged from Scotland in recent years. Hailing from Orkney, Harry Josephine Giles is widely known as a fine poet and spellbindingly original performer of their own work; Deep Wheel Orcadia now strikes out into audacious new space. In my experience reading sci-fi (and to an extent other fantastical fiction) always involves interpreting new words or new uses of familiar words for concepts, technologies, and activities. This sometimes becomes an act of translation and certainly expands the reader's understanding of words' meanings and recombinations. Some sci-fi writers minimise reader effort of this sort with detailed explanations; Andy Weir springs to mind. Others create a whole new vocabulary and let the reader work out what they can from context cues, e.g. Hannu Rajaniemi. Most fall somewhere between the two extremes. Personally I love this element of sci-fi reading, which Jo Walton wrote memorably about in What Makes This Book So Great.

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