Deep Wheel Orcadia by Harry Josephine Giles (2021)

 This is a poem, very broadly speaking. It's also, purportedly, a science-fiction novel. It's also two things in one, the original and its translation - the original being in Orcadian, the English translation, smaller, below. It's by someone who is non-binary. So it has quite a lot going on, which makes the next thing a little 'tremulous', perhaps: it won the Arthur C. Clarke award for its year. Did the judges see all the above and think a very simple "wow!" and hand it the prize? Because it is doing a lot, on the outside? For me, outsides have to match insides, which means this one really needed to be an amazing reading experience, and, of course, it wasn't. The danger would always be the oldun' of falling between stools, married with the niggle of tokenism. If this were just its Orcadian poem, it would be a slightly dull affair which comes quite a bit brighter in its last third. In the first two thirds there's a lot of musing and staring out of windows, and characters which don't deeply engage the reader, but hey, it's a poem, so the terms are different. Yes, but it's a narrative poem, so, again, we need to bring that characterisation/engagement dialectic back closer to the centre of expectation. Obviously, it's a poem by today's standards - there's no rhyme, and this is replaced by rhythm and a kind of spareness in the usual manner. I have lived in Shetland for a few years now, so my ear is becoming trained to Shaetlan and its rhythms and tonalities through daily exposure to native speakers. Orcadian is a tiny bit different, but not a lot, so reading the poem was not onerous, and I could always dip to the English below for explanation if something didn't twig. So, as a poem, middlingly OK. 'Attached' to that, the novel: by which, I think we're saying, the narrative part, which was the story of a group of characters aboard a space station, their current state of flux in terms of relationships, workish and attractional, and ambitions, realised majorly through their emotional resonances. In the last third a something occurs among the wrecks which the station houses which is associated with light, and becomes a fractal 'explosion'. In the blue light of the poem, and the musing characters, this is also two things at once - appropriate, and a bit vague. Novelistically, it would certainly be considered on the 'unresolved' side, most examples of which need to have a compensator-factor to be satisfying: magnificent writing, deep atmosphere, extraordinary rightness philosophically. I wouldn't say this achieves that. The original Orcadian, being Giles' natal language (I am assuming, anyway) has the quiet economic arrow of intention which makes it clear and resounding, the word-choice 'free'. But the English translation is another affair. There's a classic example on the first page: the Orcadian 'teddert' which would naturally translate as 'tethered' is rendered as 'ropemoormarried'. Examples then proliferate throughout the book. There could be a lot said about this - is it an attempt to make a political statement? "Orcadian's implications are so rich that we need to give all resonations"? If so, it frankly feels a bit needy. Or is it some sort of enthusiasm for the Joycean brought as a further plate to this feast? If so, the taste is "ick". Is it political in the sense of "we need to render the English such that it is a lesser experience so that the Orcadian is clear and masterful by contrast - LEARN ORCADIAN if you want to read this work well"? If so, hmmmmmm. Then why translate at all? At all events, I pity the person who feels uncomfortable with the Orcadian and is relegated to the English alone. This one, overall, is a typifying example of the danger of promising too much.