Deep Wheel Orcadia by Harry Josephine Giles

This is a bold and experimental work. The fact about experiments is that sometimes they fail; but you learn something from the failure. There is much to admire in Giles’s work, and much that perhaps requires more scrutiny.

What genre is this work? The front cover says “A Novel”, the spine says it is part of Picador Poetry and the back of the book says it is a “verse novel”.

This has always been an ambiguous and unclassifiable type of book. There is a difference between narrative poetry, such as Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and Browning’s more elaborate The Ring and the Book or Arthur Clough’s Amours de Voyage.

Deep Wheel Orcadia does not quite square this particular circle. It is written in what the cover calls “the Orkney dialect” and the author describes as “the Orkney tongue”. Each of the poems has a rendering in English published beneath, and these are done with some aplomb.

And it is a novel. I have a deep love of science fiction and know my onions in this area. It is not bad, but the tropes are all quite well-worn – there are hulking wrecks of unknown origin, the harvesting of “Light”, spectral presences, the loneliness of space, a degree of gender fluidity. None of this is new. Iain M Banks ticked all those boxes some time ago. Caulking the narrative with a sense of Orkney and technology, which is