She turned her attention to her egg, dipping each toasted soldier with military precision. When the last of the white was scooped out, she quite suddenly plunged her teaspoon through the bottom of the shell, a resounding crack in the quiet kitchen. Then she reached over, took mine, and did the same. 'So the witches can't sail in them,' she explained.
An intensity of foreboding hangs over each of the 253 pages in Amy Sackville's second novel, Orkney. It is suffocating reading, almost bare of incident or action. But what there is bristles with disconcerting significance, so that a character eating breakfast becomes a warning, and a pebble collected on the beach becomes malignant, and a lobster the very epitome of either love or perversity, depending on your perspective.
Richard and his two-day wife pitch up in Orkney, at the northernmost tip of nowhere for their honeymoon, apparently at her request . He is 60, a professor of literature and more specifically of Victorian poetry; she is barely in her 20s, only recently his brightest student and now his bride. Neither have any family to speak of. His are dead. Her mother is somewhere in Northumbria, but her Orcadian father disappeared when she was a child and she left the islands soon after. She and Richard are an unlikely conjugal pairing, and pre-judged by everyone who meets them - father and daughter is the first assumption, followed by an uncomfortable recognition. Richard narrates for us, smooth and intellectual, charming in the way that a greying male academic can be, taking great pains to tell a romantic story. He casts himself as a formerly loveless husk, hollowed out by a bachelor's life, reinvigorated by his wife's sudden appearance in his classroom and now reborn as her husband and lover. He enjoys the frisson of their relationship, the excitement of their encounters in public. Early on he recounts the first time they had dinner together, claiming she sucked his fingers in the restaurant after sharing a lobster, relishing how their fellow diners tried hard not to stare. Later on his erotic version of affairs is called into question, but Richard remains very attached to this 'memory'.
She is nameless, barely describable. Richard, who of all people should know her best, can only give us vagueries:
I have no photograph. I say, she is tall, she is thin, she has white hair and green, or bluish, or grey eyes... She has a violet freckle on her hipbone, a bruise; her hands and toes are webbed and the veins behind her knees are green.
The only number on her phone is his. She bursts into life the two or three times in the book that they encounter another person but only briefly, like a dropped match.
The novel is punctuated by cycles of waking and sleeping, and by dreams. She dreams violent nightmares of drowning, of tsumani waves and inexorable tides. She fears the sea more than anything else and cannot swim, but is drawn to it and spends her days playing chicken with it on the freezing beach. Richard's answer to nearly all her fears is to have sex, during which she clings to him 'like a limpet and whimpers'.
Richard is working on a book, his magnum opus and the culmination of:
'all the strands of forty years' thought: enchantment narratives in the nineteenth century. Transformations, obsessions, seductions; succubi and incubi; entrapments and escapes. The angel in the house becomes the maiden in the tower, the curse come upon her. Curses and cures. Folktales and fairy-tales retold. And all the attendant uncertainties, anxieties and aporia. Do I wake or do I sleep? Fantasy and phantasm. Beautiful terrible women. Vulnerable lonely cursed women. Strange and powerful women. It's an old obsession.'
These women - 'Always the women', she says. I'm afraid so, I say - are his wife's precedents. With her silver elfin hair, webbed hands and feet and mysterious Orcadian origins, she fits right into his troubling lexicon of femininity.
Or Richard makes her fit, or wants to. She won't be pinned down like a character in a poem, and he is constantly frustrated by his inability to fix her in place:
She is Protean, a Thetis, a daughter of the sea, a shape-shifting goddess who must be subdued; I hold her fast and she changes, changes in my grasp... But I am no prince and cannot overwhelm her; she will consent to marry but goes on shifting no matter how tight I grip.
Subdue, grasp, overwhelm, grip: Richard's is the romance of possession, in more ways that one. He perceives that she - this 'tiny, perfect, whittled trinket' - has possessed him, like La Belle dan sans merci. But as the honeymoon progresses, and his delight in her is darkened by ridiculous jealousies over an adolescent bird-watcher and a urine-soaked tramp, it is clear that he is the posessor and not vice-a-versa. She bruises easily, he says, ominously, on the third morning of their honeymoon.
Nearly everything takes place out in the open, in the wilderness, with the big presence of the sea and the weather-beaten Orkney landscape. Richard's new wife is a creature of this environment, standing out on the beach in all weathers, simply watching the sea come in and out. Richard doesn't join her. Instead he watches from the house, catching her in the frame of the window, literally fixing her with his gaze.
So I have taken up my station, and she is in her place, looking out. I glance from the window to the page as I work. Her view is encompassed by mind; it is not merely the sea that I see, it is the sea that she is seeing. Something at last takes the empty place at the centre of my perspective... She has brought me the sea and the sky and arranged them around her. We are quite alone in our little bay.
Impossible not to shiver at that 'quite alone' with its bare hint of threat.
Which is not to say that there isn't a whisper of the sinister about the woman herself. She and Richard tell the story of Vivien and Merlin to one another, a version in which she is 'a wilful scheming vengeful soul who by her sulks and seductions at last deceives a melancholy Merlin into revealing the spell that will confine him' and a version in which it is Merlin who pursues her, and whose 'obsessive love so exhausts her that at last, in a desperate bid to be free of him, she tricks and traps him.' Sackville leaves it to us to parse out the couple's relative power dynamic, and which if either trajectory is true in this case. Richard's wife even offers another version, in which Merlin and Vivien really are simply and innocently in love. Perhaps it is the reader's own prejudice and darkness that makes them unjustly suspiscious?
Richard's slick narrative sows many seeds of doubt, a myriad of possible interpretations. Is he a lecher or a lover; a gentleman or a brute of barely supressed violence? Ominous gaps appear in his story as it progresses, literally represented by blank spaces on the page itself. His wife slips away from him, disappearing from sight more and more. Is he breaking down, out of his mind at the possibility of loosing the happiness he has found? Or is she running away, in fear of her safety? And what kind of woman is this wife anyway? Is she something more otherworldly than a passionate literature student, a selkie or a sea-witch? Or a troubled young woman looking for escape? Is she with him by consent, or coercion, or cunning? Is she even real?
Orkney is full of the things that make folktales tick. It's dominant notes are love, longing and loss, and it captures the claustrophobia of a folktale world which is both intensely real and unreal at once. The slightness of the story is a deception; the book resonates longer and more loudly than it would appear to warrant. I'm disappointed it didn't show up on the Women's Prize for Fiction longlist this month and hope it doesn't get completely lost amidst the shortlist clamour. This is about as good a book by a woman as you could hope for.
~~Victoria~~