Diary of a Shopkeeper, 21st November
I’ve said it before, and I’m sure I’ll say it again. This is an extraordinary time for Orkney writing.
Last week three events were held here to mark Scottish Book Week. On Thursday, in Kirkwall, Samantha Clark read from her much-admired memoir, The Clearing, which describes the process of emptying out her deceased parents’ house in Glasgow. That sounds like a gloomy subject, but the narrative ranges back and forwards in time and across a wide range of subjects from art to aurora to ham radio. It’s a rich and rewarding book.
The night before, in Finstown, the Orkney Voices group, chaired by Orkney Scriever Alison Miller, read from their wonderful anthology Gousters, Glims and Veerie-orums. These 160 pages disprove the lament you sometimes hear that good Orcadian dialect is dead. It’s not spoken everywhere, it’s true, but where it is, there’s plenty of life in it yet. Dozens of poems here prove that with humour and pin-sharp observation, not least Sheila Garson’s ‘Island Life’:
Sheu lighted on him in the shop,
An he’d cheust geen in fur breed.
Beuy, he fair got his character,
And the failings o his forebears tae.
On Monday, Cal Flynn discussed her collection of essays, Islands of Abandonment, at a reading in Stromness. It’s a sometimes chilling but always fascinating account of what happens when humanity unleashes its obliterating force on nature – and how nature returns behind our backs.
Islands of Abandonment has already been shortlisted for three major awards, and to that roll of honour can now be added a nomination for this year’s Highland Book Prize. That’s something it shares with a new book by yet another Orkney author, Deep Wheel Orcadia by Harry Josephine Giles.
Giles has steered a dazzling, zigzagging path of publications and performances in recent years, pushing at the boundaries of what poetry is and does. In this new book the boundaries are expanded to infinity, as its action takes place in a space station (though one with many echoes of ordinary island life):
This weys in the data transfer’s driltan -
enerjy’s dear fer aa they mak hid here.
Yes, futuristic fictions in dense Orcadian. And why not! The book received its Orkney launch at the library in Kirkwall, on the evening of Thursday 25th. The author gave a reading and discussed Orkney language and literature, London publishers, dialect, the English translations that are harder to read than the dense Orcadian originals, and the notion that she might have written ‘Greenvoe in space.’
There’s something in that! Olaf the boatman certainly remined me of Ivan Westray, and you could say the whole bookpoemnovel is the portrait of a small island community, albeit one floating in space rather than the north Atlantic.
The funniest book I’ve read all year has also been nominated for the Highland Book Prize: Borges and Me by Jay Parini.
In 1970 Parini was a student in Pennsylvania, keen to avoid the Vietnam War draft, and even keener to understand the works of an obscure Scottish writer he’d stumbled across: George Mackay Brown.
Parini ended up writing a thesis at St Andrews University, despite the scepticism of his supervisor, who’d barely heard of GMB and certainly didn’t believe he was a worthy subject for a PhD . Desperate to learn more, Parini set off to drive to Stromness, and meet the great man himself.
Much of the humour comes from the presence of another great man, Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges. Elderly, blind, and unworldly, Borges commandeers Parini as his chauffeur, guide and dogsbody, and plunges them both into ridiculous scrapes as he licks books in a Fife library, fights for toilet time with a parsimonious B&B-keeper, and falls into Loch Ness while reciting poetry, standing up in a rowing boat.
Borges never made it to Orkney, but Parini did. His portrait of George and of Stromness may be slightly inaccurate in some small details, but nonetheless it’s a warm and generous picture, as is his account of his infuriating, inspirational travelling companion.
Beuy, that Borges fair got his character.
This diary appeared in The Orcadian on 24th November. A new one appears weekly. I post them in this blog a few days after each newspaper appearance, with added illustrations., and occasional small corrections or additions.