Diary of a Shopkeeper, 10th October
Autumn 2021 is providing a bumper harvest for Orkney’s readers. The body of poetry published in Orcadian is expanding significantly with Kevin Cormack’s Toonie Void collection, Harry Josephine Giles’ Deep Wheel Orcadia verse novel, and The Orkney Voices group’s rich and varied anthology Gousters, Glims and Veerie-Orums.
On top of that there’s a flurry of events, festschrifts and new editions in honour of our best-loved writer, George Mackay Brown, whose 100th birthday would have been next Sunday.
As if that wasn’t enough, a brand new publisher, the Orkneyology Press, launches shortly, with an exciting list of books, including Bryce Wilson’s An Orcadian Odyssey and Jocelyn Rendall’s Farstraers, Voyages and Homecoming.
Glasgow novelist Alasdair Gray famously claimed that no one noticed how magnificent a city Glasgow was, as it had been depicted so rarely in literature and other art. No such fears for Orkney! The current flood of books gives us numerous opportunities to recognise Orkney’s magnificence.
An unusual and valuable addition is Islands of Abandonment by Stromness essayist Cal Flyn. Published earlier this year to great acclaim, it has since been nominated for several awards, including within the past few days the British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding.
Quite an honour! The book more than deserves such plaudits. Subtitled Life in the Post-Human Landscape, its dozen chapters focus on different areas around the world that have been populated and then abandoned by human beings.
Sometimes the abandonment is the result of man-made catastrophe, such as Chernobyl’s ‘Nuclear Winter’. Sometimes the disaster is natural, such as the cataclysmic volcanic eruption that destroyed half of the Caribbean island of Montserrat in 1997.
Most often – and most depressingly – the human evacuation of these places follows decades of pollution and exploitation by heedless industry and government. Particularly harrowing are the chapters from the USA, featuring once-thriving cities like Detroit, decimated by ‘The Blight’, and the post-industrial landscape of Paterson, New Jersey. A whole succession of booms and busts characterised Patterson’s history: cotton, silk, locomotives, guns. Each new wave of industry soaked up natural resources and in return poured poisonous waste into the waterways and soil. Now huge swathes of the city are abandoned to scavengers, desperate rough-sleepers and nature.
And it’s nature that makes the book a lot less depressing than my summary suggests.
Time after time, in landscapes blighted by industrial detritus and even radiation, Flyn witnesses nature creeping back in, and slowly, gradually, flourishing once again.
Vegetation comes first – grass, weeds, trees – then animal and bird life. It seems that, all nature needs to thrive is for humanity to be absent. We saw some of this during last year’s lockdown, where urban streets, emptied of traffic, began to be explored by deer and other wild animals.
Flyn isn’t naively saying, ‘Don’t worry about environmental destruction: nature will prevail.’ Quite the opposite: her book is a painful testament to the damage mankind has inflicted. But despite the extent of the damage, it is not quite too late. We can, by understanding the underlying resilience of the natural world, work with it to encourage regeneration.
In a chapter that a lot of Orcadians will seek out, we are transported to Swona, for ‘The Trip to Rose Cottage’. The story of Swona’s abandonment will be known to many, but here it’s retold sensitively and evocatively. It was only the human inhabitants who had to leave. The cattle that remained are now unchallenged rulers of the island.
As Flynn writes, ‘Never before have I been so utterly aware of how the wild exists just below the surface.’ I felt the same after reading her fascinating, thought-provoking book.
In addition to her own writing, Cal does a great service to book lovers in Orkney by maintaining the website for Stromness Books & Prints. It’s stuffed with great photos and interesting features, not least a series of interviews with writers who have bookshop connections, not least Cal herself.
This diary appeared in The Orcadian on 13th October. Other diaries continue to appear weekly. I am posting them in this blog a few days after each newspaper appearance, with added illustrations., and occasional small corrections or additions.