Orkney

by Amy Sackville

Following her wonderful debut, The Still Point, Sackville returns with a strangely beautiful short novel about love and sex and obsession. A literature professor marries his prize student, a woman forty years his junior, and at her request he takes her to the sea for their honeymoon. He is embarked on his life’s work, a book about enchantment-narratives in literature, most all of them involving strange girls and women, but soon finds himself distracted by his own enchantment for his new white-haired young wife.

They travel to the Orkney Islands, the ancient Mesolithic and Neolithic site north of the Scottish coast, “the Seal Islands,” a barren place of extraordinary beauty. And as the days of their honeymoon pass his desire and his constant, yearning contemplation become his normality. His mysterious bride becomes his entire universe.

He is consumed.

Genres: Fiction, Scotland, Contemporary, Literary Fiction, Fantasy, Magical Realism, Novels

253 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 2013

About the author

Amy Sackville was born in 1981. She studied English and Theatre Studies at Leeds, and went on to an MPhil in English at Exeter College, Oxford, where she specialised in Modernism. After two years working for an illustrated books publisher, she chose to focus on writing fiction and in 2008, she completed the MA in Creative & Life Writing at Goldsmiths. She has had short stories published in anthologies from Fish Publishing and Leaf Books, and reviews and articles in various publications including The James Joyce Quarterly and The Oxonian Review of Books. She lives in West London. The Still Point is her first novel.

Reviews

[Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Maybe I was wrong after all, with Night Film. Perhaps it really is the way that we are taught to dream as children, in what language, in what realm. Perhaps it started with my parents reading to me, every night, they said, before I went to bed since before I can remember, words I could not have understood. Perhaps it was only Walt Disney’s imprint on me, the endless rounds of Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty I watched, I am told, when I was two and three years old. Maybe they were scaffolded by the inevitable pile of children’s books that teach us that magic is real and lurking behind every corner, given more conscious thought by the sort of cleaned-up, inevitably British or colonial Classics that advanced readers are given as presents as children, followed by the lush, romanticized, soaked-in-deep colors sort of high fantasy that I was lucky enough to discover in its wake before I was ready for Austen and Bronte and Woolf. Perhaps I was encouraged, not even consciously, by the books that my Manchester-born nanny read or helped me choose, the one who listened to Miss Saigon on repeat, who was, as I figured out many years later, a not-yet-out lesbian who contemplated marrying a cultured old male friend of hers with a resonating voice for a green card and who had a vanishing accent that came and went with every phone call home to her mother.

Maybe it was all a gap I needed to fill- brought up in the showcase of Suburbia, USA, with no perceivable “community” in the sense of family or a circle of friends, with two working parents who had, at least, voted with their feet to leave their families behind and start as fresh as you can in the safest, cleanest corner of the States I think you are likely to find, while their families stayed in far-flung southern and western corners of the country. I met these other families and knew them occasionally, but I think all I carried away with me, as part of me, of the one was horses and a daring cousin with red hair and all I carried away of the other was Catholicism, guilt, and Ireland.

That’s why, I think, no matter how much I’ve tried to make it go away by making fun of it, the most transcendent place I have ever been is the top of Glastonbury Tor on a deserted, misty grey day. That’s why one of my most wonderful memories is, at fourteen, “accidentally” letting my horse go in a field in Kildare and galloping until I was covered in mud and he was prancing, pleased with himself, snorting at the top of a rise in a valley while the tiny dots that were the rest of our group tried to catch up. (I can still see with the eyes I did then, vision blurry with wind and moisture and light.) That’s why, in despair, in Paris, I went to Saint-Germain-des-Pres, and sat there for hours, lit more candles than I probably remember, and began to heal.

This is how I learned how to dream. I dream, for better or for worse, in the fairy stories, fears, stereotypes, and clichés of the British Isles, mixed with the repressed passion of the Irish Catholicism I have never quite been able to deny, whatever my personal religious beliefs.

This, this, the way that Amy Sackville writes, especially as the book went on and really dived into itself, this is still, no matter what I do, how I dream.

* * *

A sixty year old professor and his nameless twenty-one year old bride are sojourning on a tiny, nearly deserted island in the Orkneys for their honeymoon. As with almost every story when these ages are involved, he was her professor of a literary sort at an anonymous university. It was a barely acknowledged courtship, as you would expect with this sort, something that did not exist until it very much did, covered over within a week with an impulsive marriage. A tale as old as time with N____________s politely redacted, with Victorian manners.



Where shall I take you, he asked, when we are wed? ‘The sea,’ she answered. ‘Will you take me to the sea?’



The story, told in chapters of each day of their honeymoon, largely consists of the professor gazing upon his “young wife” (as he persists in calling her). He sits inside during the day pretending to work and looking at her instead. She stands outside, walking the beach and looking at the sea. The scene is always framed by the window where he sits, an almost literal snapshot of the male gaze, her every movement captured and transformed by it.

She, however, she seems to intrude on his solitude only rarely. Only once does she consent to stay inside in his window seat, looking at things through the distorting glass he has been watching her through, for a morning- only to humor him. This in contrast to the days on end he can spend looking at her without tiring.

But she is aware of being captured by him, aware and wise, it seems to him:



“Shall we go home?” she said Home? I said. Well, if you’re ready to come back. If you’re quite sure you’ve been out long enough. If youv’e no more social calls to pay. She sighed. ‘I’m sorry I worried you,’ she said. “I’m sorry I moved beyond your frame, Richard.”

My frame?

‘The window.’ She said. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t stay in the picture today.’



They really meet when they tell each other stories at night. Some of the stories are, as they are with most lovers, stories of their own courtship. She remembers differently than he does, of course- which is often the case. He seems to constantly romanticize her and set her apart, make her different and special, something to justify his breathless obsession with her. It makes sense, of course. He is a sixty year old man in a power position who is, by any normal rational measure of human relationships, taking advantage of a young woman in the throes of a tentative infatuation that he could easily have quelled if he chose. He did not, for the first time in his career (so he tells us) choose- instead he possibly even more obsessed than she was.

She insists that she was not wearing a purple sweater when they met, has never worn purple, in fact it was a green sweater. He remembers her entering his class soaked with rain, with leaves in her hair, not removing them, hardly seeming to notice. She has no memory of doing this. Her story, when she speaks for herself in the light of day, sometimes seems much more straightforward. Trying to impress him, dressing carefully for class and thinking for days beforehand of what she will say in class, hating the people who talk over her and ruin it all.

In an old married couple, this would be adorable, provoke a smile- fading memories, an old man romanticizing his formerly young wife, telling fairy stories to soothe them, stories he probably knows in his heart are not true. In a sixty-year-old man and his new wife, it seems slightly more sinister, or at the very least delusional- a man telling himself stories about a girl he is trying to convince himself is special and therefore worth every bit of abandonment of reason he has decided, unilaterally, to indulge in. She is still the one indulging him, knowingly, but now it seems like a different sort of love- one where the parties have agreed to playing roles for each other as much as they can. Unsurprisingly, again, he fails to live up to his role more than she fails to meet his. In fact, the argument can be made that by the end of the book she has become absorbed by her role entirely, which finally allows him to complete a cycle that could not have been complete without the sort of pain, yearning, obsession and loss that really would not have made for the sort of marriage that makes it through, as I read recently, 20,000 mundane Wednesdays.

He meets his role in the relationship by telling her other stories too, stories of enchantment, which, not at all surprisingly, are his academic speciality. There are stories of Melsuine, the sea-kings and the selkies, Merlin and Vivien. He tells stories and she listens and smiles and absorbs them. More interestingly, she herself then tells stories and he listens and obsesses and guards his castle jealously from the dragons of males who appear in her stories or who speak a word to her in life. Their life is surrounded and bounded by stories, by analyzing them, living inside them, thinking about their parallels and finding new variations.

They also meet in the subconscious depths of the evening, where she dreams violent dreams of the sea. The dreams morph each evening into nightmares, all of them, not surprisingly, of the sea. Gnashing and bashing and tearing and sighing, calling and screaming and biting and scratching, gasping and grasping and falling- in and out of the sea and its creatures all night. The sexual side of their relationship is conducted before, during and after these sea voyages, drenched in ancient tales and female symbolism.

In one disturbing crossover of this relationship into the conscious realm, his wife takes a bath and asks her husband to hold her under the water for a moment. He obliges, only for a moment, only to have her stay there, almost oblivious, until he, in a panic, pulls her up and out of her waking fantasy, just like he does every evening. The frightening side of stories-come-to-life is revealed with an urgent worry that perhaps this has gone beyond acceptable half-conscious role-play and both players involved need outside help to save them both, from drowning.

I actually think that, to let reality intrude for a minute and contemplate her likely place in the actual world: it is most likely that the unnamed wife suffered from crippling depression, from a psychosis that needed help, and Richard was a form of self-medication, the sort of medication she's clearly been using for a long time- stories, tales, sea-creatures. He supposedly had an an inexhaustible store of them- thirty years worth as a professor of the stuff, endless variations to tell that she could lose herself in- and going to the sea was most likely to bring them out. The implication is that she drowned herself, and I, perhaps for my own personal bias of experience reasons, believe that this is the most likely thing to have happened. I do think that Richard was responsible, in some sense for her death, but because he aided and abetted her, he let her indulge the most morose and sad parts of herself and let her play a role, infatuated with it, rather than seeing it for the serious issue that it is, even after the bath moment, which I think for most of us would have been a trigger and a recognition that perhaps there is some danger here to contemplate. She pushes farther and farther and he does not rein her in, and in the dual father/lover role he's playing, with the power dynamic as thrown off as it is, I think there's some argument to be made that he should responsibly recognize what is going on here. But he's crossed over into the tale, too, far away from reality, like the rest of us.

The alternative, of course, is that Richard is not only rationalizing his relationship with her, but also perhaps acting out one of these tales, so far gone with his possession of her that he actually concocts a tale and casts himself, sickeningly, as the main character- and she can only meet her role by her eventual disappearance or death. But I actually don't think that this is what happened. I think the first explanation, from all we know of her, even the parts where reality obtrudes and Richard happens to note down something that does not march with her 'role', I still think that depression, irresponsibly aided by Richard's indulgence, is the most likely explanation.

But whatever the explanation for the resolution, I really think that this was, in the end, was an updated fairy story. I think that we were given the psychology behind the likely reasons that such a tale would be enacted in modern day, along with the temptation to get lost in the tale itself, which I think both characters experience, and in the wife's case, I think she is willing to follow through fully with, unable to go back to a life that she apparently feels unsuited for. I found that recognizable- after you've found something that you can do, it's hard to walk away from it, however strange.

During my reading, this otherworldly aspect was most apparent, which meant I didn't think too much about the reality, after the first 30 or so pages. Sackville did a great job of absorbing me into the atmosphere of the place and into Richard's wishes and dreams, which, whatever the ultimate reason, have everything to do with how things turn out.

* * *

Sackville does a mostly (with one caveat) really wonderful job weaving her enchantment about this story, though. I think the construction is really instructive as an effective way to reel in an audience and keep them there.

Aside from one section at the beginning, when I thought that she dwelled for too long of an awkwardly long time on the professor’s guilt and rationalization issues (which, for me, was either showing her hand too early or ruining the potential for us to get wrapped up in the fairy tale at all because of our repulsion from such a man), it’s well done, almost a recipe for a workable incantation

1) Begin with an almost-full-immersion taste of what is to come. Reveal the setting and the voice and a story in mid-swing.
2) Continue with a reflection and a dose of reality, allowing the reader to recognize or identify with the main character in some way. Let them follow you into ordinary life and settle in.
3) But not too much. Yank them out again into the enchanted, out-of-this-world present, remind them that there is more to come.
4) Go back again, build up enough impatience with real life that they are ready to follow you a little bit deeper into whimsy and dreams, but make fun of it just a little, with just a mix-in of the everyday.
5) Mix the two. Bring in psychology, start showing your characters’ flaws more openly.
6) Throw doubt on the fire- Who is telling the truth? Why? What is my bias telling me? How harmless is it?
7) Immerse fully.
8) Let it all stew together as much as you like. Weave it with whatever descriptive gems and jewels you like, indulge yourself as much as you care to.
9) Bang: Something happens at the end, something that could be real and could be fantasy and could be something of both, or entirely one or the other- did it happen at all? It should all happen in a rush.
10) But end: not with a bang, but with a whisper.

And, as with any effective spell, keep your audience from realizing that you’re doing it right up until the very end, until they ask themselves what on earth they just read and why they kept reading.

When I asked myself, all I could remember at first were words, the incantation itself, creating itself, the characters implicit in whispering it to themselves and the audience, illustrating themselves for us, illustrating how they wish to be for us, or how they cannot help being:

“The gale galloped through the night, all along the coastline, whipping up the sea and massing purple rainclouds on its way inland; it did not cease, all through the darkest hours. They call this wind a skreever, so I’m told, a name for some fiend- and that indeed is how it sounds. Some ancient, rag-winged, shrieking thing, rending and tearing at the scrub-dry heather… It huffed and puffed around the walls of our little stone house, and clawed about inside, in every corner, searching, a stealthy intruder restlessly riffling pages and poking into every cranny and crack, whickering through every crevice, searching, searching, frantic, thorough, ruthless; dislodging the quiet spiders clutching stubbornly to the rafters and watching as their webs tattered; breathing on the last glow of the embers before skirling up the chimney in a billow of ash.”

“It is late and she is in the kitchen, she is singing to herself, singing to the sea. I cannot make out the words; half a hum, half a deep, thrumming song, low and sorrowing, an old hymn; drowned in the wind, it comes in snatches, plaintive, distant. There must be fishermen, out in the squall furling and thickening around them, struggling to find their way home; it is a voice to be wrecked on the rocks for.”

“I watch its shifts and changes. It is powder-blue, it is amethyst, it is black, bruised, blood-purple, garnet, calm and flat, harmless, or biding its time. It is a clear night, tonight. The soft dimming into evening; all the old, dead ghosts of stars, haunting the clear sky, brightening against the dark in the glimmerans. Loverly islanders’ word for twilight. How she’d love that. Did I have that from her?

The sky periwinkle, with a sketching of graphite clouds, the barest pencil-trace; lilac where it meets the sea, deepening up to the apex, mussel-blue. That was hers. I am trying to her her voice say it. Prussian blue. Ink-washed. Indigo… Bedtime blue, Richard, she says. Bedtime blue."


It was only slowly that I pulled the structure out from under the seaweed and seashells and waves and mirrors and smoke and saw what she had done. And I was no less emotionally affected by it. Which is probably what speaks the best for this book in the end. I was so implicated in it and drawn into its way of talking to me that I still let it do it to me even when I knew what was happening.

* * *

So maybe I was wrong. Maybe it is just the way that we swing in what we love in the end. Maybe it is all particular and there is very little that is objectively “good” or “bad” about books. Maybe, with this sort of thing, with contemplating the mysterious and the otherworldly and the not-quite-there, with anything that asks you to abandon your reason somewhat to come along with me into the Black Forest, there is a unique mixture for each person. This has a lot of the same mix of psychology and legend and stories and dreams and passion that Possession does, that Memoirs of Hadrian does.

I don’t think I was completely wrong, though. That mixture still has to come from the emotional recognition inside the situation, from unraveling the psychology in a satisfying way, not from the characters telling me what is going on, or from outward pings of recognition in characteristic or type. All of these stories, whatever outward things they share, are, more importantly, about the gradual, introspective reveal of the pent up dreams and passions of characters who have never fully shared of themselves before. I think I am responding to that reveal, whatever its wrapping. Therefore, it is still a well-executed story type, rather than a bunch of signifiers, that I am responding to.

And Sackville has offered a wonderful entry into this category of stories.

I can’t wait to read The Still Point.

[Blair · Rating 4 out of 5]

Orkney is a short, exceptionally intense narrative charting the honeymoon of a strange, mismatched couple. Richard, the narrator, is a sixty-year-old English professor who is nearing retirement and working on a book which is to be the crowning glory of his career: a study of myths and legends about enchantment, and more specifically, women who enchant men. His new wife - a woman who, it soon becomes clear, he barely knows - is thirty-nine years younger than him, a former student, an ethereal girl with white hair and eccentric habits. Orkney, it seems, is her choice of honeymoon destination, and the lonely, windswept landscape proves to be a fitting backdrop for this tale of obsession and personal mythology.

Richard's wife is never named in the narrative. She is always 'my wife', 'my young wife' (how he loves that 'young'!), 'my little _____'. This is the first of many hints that this is very much his version of events: despite his claims of all-consuming love for her, her voice has no place here. Richard is, above all, a man of stories, and it becomes clear he prefers the stories he has invented about his wife to the truth of what happened. He believes, for example, that she was wearing a purple jumper the day they met (she insists she has never owned one); she ordered lobster and licked it from his fingers on their first date (she says he ordered it, and put his fingers to her mouth); she wakes him during the night for sex throughout their honeymoon (she infers that he is doing this to her). Despite his wife presenting evidence that contradicts his memories (fantasies?), he goes on believing in them.

The story unfolds slowly, with a chapter devoted to each day. There is a plot, of sorts - vague mystery surrounds Richard's wife's past, particularly with regards to why she has chosen to come to Orkney, and what ties she has to the island. However, for the most part this is a detailed, claustrophobic account of Richard's 'love' for his wife. There is no doubt he is completely obsessed by her, yet he actually seems to prefer her not to interfere with his thoughts, even as he treats her every step outside their holiday cottage with suspicion and jealousy. Perhaps the biggest mystery of all is why this girl would ever be attracted to Richard, physically or in any other way, let alone marry him - brief suggestions of the similarities between Richard and her father, a man who abandoned her as a child, provide the only semi-realistic explanation. But subtle clues scattered across Richard's narrative allow the reader to put together a different interpretation of the truth.

When I read mainstream press reviews of literary novels like this one, I often find there is a general consensus about whether the book is good or bad. While researching for this review, I was interested to come across two reviews, both from UK newspapers, offering very different interpretations of the book. Holly Williams, writing in the Independent, focuses on the obsessive nature of Richard's narrative, which she describes as creepy and possessive. Meanwhile, William Skidelsky in the Telegraph finds Richard more sympathetic and believes his love to be genuine. Does this disparity perhaps reflect how different reactions to the book might typically be in male and female readers? The titles of the reviews say it all, really. Williams: 'How do I love thee? Let me go on and on'. Skidelsky: 'Orkney, about an island honeymoon, enchants...' The absolute last thing this book did was enchant me; it made my skin crawl. My personal reading of the novel was that the reader was supposed to find Richard disgusting: if I honestly believed you were supposed to like him, I would have hated the whole thing, in fact I probably wouldn't even have finished it.

Here is my theory regarding the ending (many spoilers involved, but if you have read the book then I would love to know whether you agree!): I really am quite convinced that Richard killed his wife. His fantasies about their future were so unrealistic and limiting that it seemed impossible life would really continue like this. The final paragraph of the Wednesday chapter hints at his involvement in her disappearance/death, and it's also foreshadowed by the scene earlier in the book in which he holds her under water in the bath (according to him it's because she wants him to, to help her learn to swim - but can this version of events be trusted?) The line 'I may have been a little rough with her' is particularly chilling: we already know this man is dishonest, so how much of an understatement is this, exactly? In the end, it seems obvious we can't trust anything Richard says about his relationship, and that made me wonder what to make of the other details he gave away. Does his wife really have virtually no contact with her family and, as seems to be the case, no friends - despite seeming vivacious and intelligent - or has he cut her off from them? Are they even truly married, or is this part of a fantasy he is - they are - acting out (and therefore bound to end)? How much is he coercing her? Going back to the reviews, Williams touches on the idea that she may be a figment of Richard's imagination, but I am inclined to believe this is not the case given the scenes that involve other characters reacting to - and interacting with - her, and indeed the fact that most of this interaction displeases him. The other option, of course, is that she has committed suicide or deliberately made herself disappear. Faced with the prospect of a life spent with this man, I wouldn't blame her.

You may have noticed that between finishing this book and reviewing it, I have upgraded my rating from three to four stars, something I hardly ever do. The reason for this is that the more I think about, examine and analyse the story, the more I am fascinated by it, and the more I am convinced the author intended it to be picked apart in this way - all those hints, clues, double meanings, opaque references. (This is why I love reviewing books, by the way: if I hadn't had to think about my reactions so extensively in order to write this, I would have never have seen all these layers and meanings.) There is much more to Orkney than meets the eye. It is disturbing and uncomfortable, and completely subverted the expectations I had at the beginning - when I started reading, I thought it was going to be a cloying, over-romantic love story. The prose is, perhaps, a little too much at times, but I felt it worked because I could really believe that a man like Richard would think and write in exactly this style. It also evokes the bleak beauty of the setting wonderfully. Upon finishing this book, I felt a sort of relief, and was absolutely sure I would never want to read it again... Yet the more I look back on it, the more I feel almost desperate to revisit it.

[Gabrielle (Reading Rampage) · Rating 3 out of 5]

What a haunting, dream-like little novel… The title alone won me over: the Orkney Isles are a place I long to visit with every fiber of my being, so any story set there is sure to interest me, even more so when it seems to be a long, poetic rambling about the strangest of honeymoons…

Richard is a sixty years old English professor, a specialist of the strange women to be found in fairy and folk tales. He marries one of his student, a woman forty years younger than him, who requests that their honeymoon be spent by the sea, on a small island in Orkney, near where she was born. He is so captivated by his young bride that he agrees, and off they go, to stay in a small cottage by the shore. As he works on a book about myths and legends, he looks out the window at his young wife, who can stare at the sea for hours but never puts as much as a toe in the water.

This could have been the tale of a lecherous old man, obsessed with a woman young enough to be his daughter. Because Richard is not just mesmerized, he is well and truly obsessed by the silver-haired young creature he married. But it's more a tale of someone under a spell they can't shake off...

The writing is gorgeous: delicate, erudite, flowing with an almost incandescent rhythm, lush with beautiful and surreal images. I love the haunting and desolate landscapes of Scotland, the pebble beaches, the wild sea, and Amy Sackville loves them just as much – and she captured them exquisitely on the page.

And yet, despite how much praise I can heap on Sackville's prose and ideas, I did not enjoy "Orkney" as much as I thought I would. There was the repetitiveness of Richard's thoughts, always about his wife, her innocence, her beauty, the various colors of the sea and the sky... It's all beautiful, but it's spread on a little thick, for lack of a better way to put it. I found myself a bit smothered by the story, especially as I guessed where it was heading and how it would finish.

3 and a half stars; I think this book will appeal to fans of luscious prose and tragic, Celtic fairy-stories.

[Alexis Hall]

So this was one of those “did he kill his wife, did she die, was the whole thing imagined, or did vanish into the sea like something from a folktale” deals. Err, spoiler.

But it’s so gorgeously written, I found myself fascinated in spite of myself.

The deal is: the narrator is a sixty-year-old lit professor (specializing in folklore, tales of enchantment etc. oh d’you see) who fell in love with his student and impulsively married her, despite knowing fuck all about her.

They’ve come to the Orkney Islands for their honeymoon. She spends her days watching the sea. He spends his days watching her. They come together in the evenings to talk, share stories—although it quickly becomes clear that there are gaps in the stories they tell about each other, for example he insists she first came to class in a purple jumper, and she claims she’s never worn purple in her life.

And the narration itself is at once obsessively focused and evasive. Professor ______ watches his wife endlessly, describes her endlessly. Yet never reports his own dialogue directly. And will often skate past or under-explain the times they’re in conflict. He never quite lets go of his image of her wearing purple, for example, despite the fact she contradicts him directly and he later notices she only ever wears green and grey. It’s in these moments we see him actively choosing fantasy over the reality of the woman he has married:

Yes, it is such a pleasure to dwell on the tale alone, while she is in her bath, and not here to interject with her nonsense about not wearing purple.

There are several incidents of semi--subsumed violence as well. He describes drying her “almost violently” after a bath or confesses, at one point, “I may have been a little rough with her” (What does that mean, my dude?). And there’s this:

I saw her eyelids flicker and reached for her. I rolled her onto her back and held her under. Her drowning eyes. ‘I have a headache,’ she said, but relented in the end.

Needless to say, the image of drowning (literally and figuratively) recurs a lot in this book, and here we have it applied to sex. And let’s not dwell too much on that uncomfortable word *relent*.

They also drink a lot of whisky over the course of the book. Particularly towards the end of it. And there’s at least one brushed past “whisky hangover” that follows an even sequence presented to us—at the time—at face value.

Professor _____ is unreliable is fuck is what I’m saying. And I probably need to stop relating every slightly dodgy bloke to Humbert Humbert. But I personally felt, with his erudition, his claims of enchantment and explicitly expressed vulnerability, this particular narrator was making claims upon our sympathy he did not necessarily deserve.

Anyway, whatever conclusion you draw about what happened (or if, even, such a conclusion matters) this book is a bloody marvel. Claustrophobic, exquisitely ambiguous and so gorgeously written it made me wanted to embark an ill-advised marriage to a much younger woman and take her to the Orkney Islands for an inevitably tragic honeymoon.

And then all at once, a crack appeared in the cloud, the sun at one corner of it like a god’s eye, casting a piercing lancet across the sky; and then one after another, rods of silver broke through to announce his presence. Like some awful ruthless salvation, the sun burned the edge of the cloud-bank magnesium white, and shone brilliant on the still-tender, cleansed world; the rock pools transformed into blinding mirrors and the sea, so lately needled to fury, was lulled and banded with whispering silver as it approached the shore, and there was the terrible argent fire of the cloud’s lining after the storm

[Kat · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 A book this exquisitely written should not have left me unsatisfied, frustrated even, in the end. I genuinely adored the stunning descriptions of Orkney's solitude and violent seas and stormy skies. I was intrigued by the expert build-up to a dark undercurrent of a sinister fairy-tale waiting to happen. Not to mention that lovely age gap.

Unfortunately the author was so infatuated with her own prose of her heroine's peculiarities and the sea's harsh beauty, that she drowned in lush, but undeniably repetitive descriptions of the characters' 'daily grind' on the island. She only managed to briefly resurface at the very end to quickly wrap up the, until then, plotless story in a predictable and bland manner. In that regard, I think this review is spot on.

[Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is lovely: a beautifully painted story of love, obsession and loss, set on a remote northern Scottish isle, rising and falling like the tide …

“She’s staring out to sea now. My young wife. There she stands on the barren beach, all wrapped up in her long green coat, among the scuttle and clutter of pebbles and crabs. She stares out as the water nears her feet and draws back, and when that soft and insistent suck of the tide gets close enough to slurp at her toes she shuffles herself up the shore. Soon the beach will be reduced to a strip of narrow sand and she will be forced to retreat to the rocks; and then, I think, she’ll come back to me. In the meantime, I watch from the window, as she stares out to sea.”

Richard is a sixty-year-old English professor, Richard, captivated by his lovely young bride. She had been his student, his star pupil, and after a year of secret encounters, they ran away to get married, and then they ran to the one place in the world that called her. Orkney.

It was the sea that called her, and though she was frightened by its power, though maybe she had lost love ones to the sea, she had to watch it. Her husband can only watch, entranced by her. He is proud of his bride, and there are times when she clings to him, times are happy together. Times when Richard cooks for them both, when they sit together by the fire, drinking whisky and telling each other stories, when they retire to bed together.

But their nights are disturbed by her vivid dreams of being engulfed by the sea …

Richard is on sabbatical, working on the book that will be his crowning achievement: a study of myths and legends about enchantment. Maybe the fair, ethereal girl standing alone in a windswept landscape has escaped from one of those stories. He knew little about her, and she contradicted many of the details in his stories of their history.

The story unfolds slowly, driven not by the simple plot but by the lovely, lovely writing. The words are poetic, lyrical, and lyrical and they describe the ebb and flow of the waves, the changing of the light, the coming of autumn and winter. The sea, the shoreline, the weather, everything came alive.

And it changed with the story: as Richard’s love grew obsessive the skies darkened, the days shortened, and the weather closed in.

But this isn’t a book to write about. It’s a book to feel, and a book that I know will haunt me.

[Michelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

The language is beautiful, but the plot is lacking. And, though the language is vivid, it's evoking the same feelings and images over the entire book.This does envelop the reader in the island and the narrator's mind, but it also seems limiting. The poetry wasn't enough to overcome the predictability of the plot--most of the book is the older male narrator staring out the window at his youthful bride, who in turn stares into the sea. The characters are mysteries, especially the wife, which saddens me a bit because I'm always on the lookout for interesting female characters. And though the wife seems based on some of the folklore mentioned in the book, there are plenty of stories based on fairy tales that also have well-developed characters (see Angela Carter's short stories, for instance). There are also plenty of beautifully written books withs simple plots that are done successfully (see Annie Ernaux, Marguerite Duras, and Carole Maso). I'm not sorry I read it, not at all, but there are plenty of books I'd recommend first.

[Arie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A strange, eerily timeless, haunting little tale. Tightly wound and claustrophobic, despite the wild ocean just outside the story's doors and the lush (but not overworked) prose. The unreliable narrator adds to the feeling that everything - characters, setting, story, ending - keeps slipping just out of grasp.

I think I'm having a moment's re-obssession with the selkie myth, and this is a beautiful - if subtle, subtle - addition to my imaginary collection of retellings.

[Rowena Lewis · Rating 2 out of 5]

There's no doubt this book is beautifully written but the storyline of two unlikeable guffs on their honeymoon on a remote Orcadian island just bored me to tears. There is something so creepy and unsettling about a 40 year age gap for a start, I then got so fed up of being force fed imagery and alliteration of the sea. It dragged in for page after page. And lastly I am just sick of reading about islanders being portrayed as suspicious grotesque old goats swaddled in bundles of cloth and muttering unwelcoming phrases in an unintelligible dialect. So patronising and so completely the opposite of the Orkney character which tends to be warm, welcoming and friendly. Ok maybe everyone apart from the man's wife was grotesque to him, in her shadow, and that he didn't want to share her with anyone. But that wasn't too clear and came across as insulting. I felt sorry for the guy in the end but hey ho. I was quite glad to be done with it.

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perhaps appropriately for a book so wound up in literature and story telling, all the while I was reading I was reminded of other books. So if you like this (and I loved it, for the atmosphere and slowly growing sense of menace and all the playful listings of colours), you might like any of these books...
Possession - firstly the preoccupation with mythic Victorian literature that runs through both books, and also the academic romance
Lolita - Orkney is perhaps Lolita if Humbert had liked just slightly older girls - prof Richard has the same talent for predatory descriptions of his ex-student wife... he also describes her a nymph at least once!
On Chesil Beach - both have bleak beach settings, and also the same lyrical tone of writing that I adore
Telling the Sea - this is a children's book that has stayed in my mind for many many years, mostly for its compelling descriptions of an obsession with the sea, very similar to that of Richard's wife...
The Remains of the Day - again, an older man with a very conveniently bad memory who makes for an extremely unreliable narrator

[Nicholas · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was given Orkney when I returned from a trip to the Orkney Islands. Indeed, it appears from the Acknowledgments that Sackville and I actually visited one of the same outlying northerly islands, Westray (which is truly stunning). There are some moments of beautiful description in this novel, both of the landscape and the Orcadians who make their home in the islands. But that's about all there is. The novel is sort of a meditation on love and longing and a bunch of other things that bored me to tears, told from the perspective of a 60-year-old English professor (English by nationality and by discipline) who has just married his very favorite 21-year-old student and taken her on their honeymoon to the Orkney Islands (which is where she was born). She has silver hair, dreams of fish and drowning a lot, and seems to spend most of her time on the beach looking at the sea. Meanwhile, he spends all his time looking out the window at her while pretending to work on his magnum opus, for which, we are told repeatedly, he has taken a sabbatical. And aside from a couple trips to the local store for provisions and one big event at the end (which is meant to make us question everything that comes beforehand), that just about summarizes the storyline in Orkney. So if you're drawn to the ethereal and the otherworldly, like writerly tricks, and can get over the 40-year age gap ick factor, this is a novel for you. If you prefer a book where things actually happen, stay away.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

Orkney was partially written during a stay on Westray, and anyone who has visited the outlying Orkney Islands will certainly recognize that windy seaside bleakness. Still, there is something universal about the author’s evocation of the silences and mysteries in marriage. In this respect Orkney has many precursors, from Gone Girl and The Beginner’s Goodbye to On Chesil Beach, all tales of newlyweds who do not quite seem suited to each other.

The reader need not have made the pilgrimage to Westray, for Sackville brings it to life with astonishing clarity. Though memory of the plot might not persist, the atmosphere of Orkney will linger. (My full article is at The Island Review, a lovely website I urge you to visit.)

[Bettie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bettie's Books

And so on to Wandaful
:O)

[Claire · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Orkney" has left me reeling. It was a fascinating book, holding my attention from start to finish. Richard, an aging Professor in Literature, has married his most talented student - an enigmatic young woman who is not once named, as Richard is deeply possessive of her. She is referred to as "my young wife", and he waxes lyrical about her charms. They travel to Orkney for their Honeymoon, a whim of hers that may concern her missing father, the island and its ever shifting weather providing the perfect background for a dark tale layered with mythology.

This novel raises many questions about the nature of love, obsession, and whether or not the two can coexist. On one hand, they are newlyweds and it seems perfectly natural for Richard to have been fixated on his new bride. On the other, what begins as a healthy pride can quickly be considered jealously.

It also seems that there is an element of fantasy on his part. I believe that his wife is as real as any fictional character can be, as she interacts with other characters. That being said, their memories of a whirlwind courtship do not add up. The inconsistencies begin as little things, such as Richard recalling her wearing a purple jumper during their first meeting - a jumper his wife denies ever having owned. However, the situation escalates into something rather more sinister.

Richard maintains that his wife has been waking him up during the night for sex, but she suggests the opposite is true. Richard's attentions leave her with bruises, and towards the end he confesses that he may have been "rough" with her. Considering his tenuous relationship with the truth, one has to wonder how much Richard would be willing to admit, even to himself. His memory and behaviour could also be influenced by his alcohol consumption.

Richard's particular focus is mythological women who have enchanted men, until he is transfixed by his wife. She seems celestial, with her white hair and eccentricities, and yet it is as though Richard projects his dreams onto her. Rather than working on his book, he spends a significant portion of each day watching his wife and imagining details about her.

The characterisation is spot on, consistent throughout the novel. Although the florid language can become a little wearing, it is beautiful and provides a narrative entirely in keeping with Richard's profession. Also, "Orkney" is very well paced. The chapters are divided up into days, which makes for easy reading. If anything, it is the sinister turn of the plot that makes "Orkney" difficult to read, and yet I could not look away.

[Callum McLaughlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Orkney is a quiet, claustrophobic look at an unconventional relationship, fuelled by Scottish folklore. Richard is a 60-year-old literature professor. His 21-year-old wife is his former student. Pale, silver-haired, enigmatic, and beguiling, she requests they spend their honeymoon on one of the wild and remote Orkney Isles.

Each chapter follows a day spent on the island. It has to be said that this isn’t a hugely plot driven novel. Events, themes, and ideas are explored in an almost cyclical way. To some, this may prove frustrating. For me, it created a sense of ebbing and flowing, like the tide against the island’s shores; of being suspended in time and place, as the characters themselves feel once cut off from society. Sackville’s prose is so beautiful, her sense of setting and atmosphere so evocative, that I was more than happy to spend extra time in the book’s lilting grasp.

Richard is a storyteller, in several senses of the word. He is spending a sabbatical working on a book about female figures from myth and legend, and it becomes increasingly clear that the line between these fictional women and his real wife is very much blurred. Projecting his fantasies onto her, she remains nameless throughout his narration, presented instead as an impossibly idolised vision that she could never live up to; her version of events constantly contradicting that which he presents to us. Whilst it could be argued that the writing is overly flowery at times, it ties in perfectly with Richard’s desire to embellish and beautify the truth into something greater or more pleasing.

Ultimately, the book explores love, obsession, possession, and loss. There’s an air of mystery surrounding Richard’s wife. Who is she? What is her past? Why is she simultaneously drawn to and afraid of the sea? With Richard’s mindset ruled by his fascination with her, and her stifled sense of self reflected in her recurring nightmares of drowning, it becomes interesting to consider who holds the greatest power and influence over the other.

If you’re aware of the stories the novel draws from, there’s a sense of inevitability with regards to where the story is heading, and indeed, Sackville employs much unsettling foreshadowing throughout. But this adds a melancholic tone and a sense of mounting tension to the whole thing that really worked for me. With such a deft and subtle use of (possible) magical realism, and Richard established as a wildly unreliable narrator detached from reality, the end can be interpreted in several very different ways, at once tragic, chilling or hopeful, depending on your reading of the text. It’s one I would love to discuss with people!

[Sharon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Orkney is a lyrical, unsettling portrait of what happens when love, obsession, and reality collide.

We follow the Professor, Richard, and his unnamed bride (forty years his junior) on their honeymoon to one of the Orkney islands - her preferred destination. He is fixated on her, entwining the living person with the women from myth he studies, and unable to quite believe he's snared her for himself. Yet she remains elusive, her memories conflicting with his, her time almost wholly spent gazing at the sea.

With the power of a dark enchantress, Sackville weaves a world of water, myth, and uncertainty, centred on Richard's intense worship and possessiveness of his wife. Her language has a stunning poetry to it, which makes time malleable - the writing could place this story in any era, even if the references to mobile phones and SLR cameras do not.

More so than the landscape, water and the sea permeate every aspect of this story. Oceanic imagery pervades his wife's dreams, as well as his own view of his wife - he recalls her drenched in water over and over. Storytelling is also woven into the fabric of the novel - their relationship is never as alive as when they tell each other tales, of sea nymphs and selkies and bewitchments (each containing a grain of truth for their own circumstances).

Sackville writes from the Professor's perspective - he is both sympathetic and abhorrent, pompous and vulnerable - a mix that is quite unsettling. At times the writing and themes reminded me of Everything Under - the blend of myth and reality.

This isn't a plot-driven novel, so I would only recommend it for those looking to be transported to an eerie, ambiguous place, threaded with confusion, distance and illusion.

Recommended if you liked: On Chesil Beach

[Misha · Rating 2 out of 5]

After having adored Amy Sackville's 'The Still Point', I had expected a similar experience. Unfortunately, this was a disappointment.

This is the story of a vainglorious Literature Professor who marries his young and brilliant student. The story follows their honeymoon in Orkney - a place almost out of mythology to match the mythological nature of the Professor's mysterious wife. His obsession with his wife takes over him completely as he can think of nothing else but her - his moods varying between yearning, insecurity and extreme jealousy.

Amy Sackville's poetic writing & atmosphere creation is something I had loved in 'The Still Point', but these are the very things that I feel compromised on the character development in this book. Yes, I understand that both the Professor and his wife, especially his wife, were SUPPOSED to be out of reach from the readers. I was SUPPOSED to look at the wife through the Professor's yearning eyes - reducing his wife's human characteristics to a mere idol to be worshiped, as if she had no real thoughts, voice, dreams or dimensionality other than being the object of the Professor's desire. That is the very thing that creeped me out utterly.

Both the characters come across as equally lifeless ultimately. And the 'tragic' end made absolutely no impact on me.

Well, onto better books then.

[Wilja Wiedenhöft · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ach dem meinen Lust auf Poesie befriedigt war, fand ich mich in der Mitte des Buches wieder, die sich als etwas zäh darstellte. Das Ende war irgendwie absehbar und seltsam. Schlau wird man daraus nicht. Ich muss noch ein bisschen darüber nachdenken wie ich es finde.

[Ilyhana Kennedy · Rating 3 out of 5]

When I reached page 100, I felt the slow creep of boredom settling in, boredom and irritation, also a sense of suffocation in attempting to find a story amidst the writer's obsession with obsession written in such elegant text.
I began to feel that the protagonist's obsession with his love was merely an instrument upon which to exhibit an ability to carefully construct towers of gridlocked sentences.
I longed for some guts and real feeling. And I longed for something to happen.
Finally the language loosens and I feel an entry to the relationship. I am in there with the relationship rather than feeling like a distanced observer.
Yes the storyline is predictable (what there is of it) but at the same time left open ended.
It's a tough read.
I did like the way the Selkie fable underwrote the story of the relationship.

[Susan · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5*
There is some beautiful writing and imagery in this book about an ageing professor, who after a lifetime of bachelorhood marries a young, beautiful and enigmatic student.
It's the writing that earns this book my rating, because although I definatly wanted to finish it, I became slightly bored by its repetitiveness, as it meandered to its somewhat predictable end.
I was disappointed, because I really loved Amy Amy Sackville's first book The Still Point, and was excited to read her second....

[Hugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting and poetic tale laced with Orcadian folklore.

[Karen Foster · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this novella so captivating... it's a strange, ethereal tale of love and obsession. The setting of the wild and stormy remote Scottish island, is captured by such gorgeous writing.... and the obsessive love of an older professor and his fragile young wife is told with subtlety and care. It's a novel to allow to sweep over you... it's all about the atmosphere...

[Dawn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful evocative writing, anyone who has ever been to Orkney will recognise the beauty, colours and wildness of the islands.

[Sally · Rating 1 out of 5]

Wonderful writing but I guess a story is nice to have too. By the end of this book I was actually hoping they would both die.

[Zoë Siobhan Baillie · Rating 2 out of 5]

1.5. This was a really disappointing and frustrating read. I was excited to read it as it'd been endorsed by writers I enjoy, and "spooky women in rugged environments" is a beloved genre of mine.

From the first few pages I already realised 1) I hate this narrator and 2) I was pretty sure where the plot was going, but on both counts I optimistically hoped for better. I was convinced right until the last chapter that the (vain, pompous, patronising, self-absorbed) narrator was going to either gain some kind of insight or failing that, have his arse handed to him. I was also convinced that something other than the extremely obvious "true nature" of his wife would turn into something more interesting, but no.

Maybe you're *supposed* to hate the narrator, but honestly a whole novel told from the smug male gaze was too much to stomach. There was no twist, no commentary on this, and the descriptions of sex and his wife's body and her "lilac-tipped breasts" read like the ill advised erotic writings of an aging telegraph journo who thinks he's a stud.

In fact the whole book read like an aging telegraph journo who thinks he's a stud, and *maybe* that was on purpose but... Why? When there is already just so much of this writing by pompous men impressed with their own intelligence about just how mysterious women are, why ape it? Well, the book went down well with literary types who presumably didn't want to vomit at the endless word-play games the couple played and the extremely outdated stereotypical portrayal of "wild" Orcadians and their medieval ways, and tortured descriptions of the sea.

Manic selkie dream girl.

[Emily Silva · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really odd (positive). Reading the book felt like floating in the tide somehow. 5/5.

I was given the book by a friend and rapidly devoured it. I liked the constant foreshadowing and inclusion of folklore stories enmeshed in the narrator's dialogue to weave a tale of seemingly fantastical reality.

I found the narrator (MMC) sometimes intolerable in his description of life, his wife, and his insecurity. However, as the story went on I enjoyed how his anxiety and romanticism coloured his relationships and ultimately how he handles the ending (no spoiler).

I felt like I knew what was coming but not quite how it would shape out but really liked it all the same.

[Camren Walker · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an eerie and atmospheric read. It's perfect for the long winter in the northern hemisphere. The older man/younger woman relationship is claustrophobic because of the academic subculture. It's also intimate because of the isolated stay on the Orkney Islands. The ending is very mysterious and will stay with you some time.

[Sam · Rating 1 out of 5]

I am absolutely baffled by some of these other reviews. Did we read the same book?

Orkney felt like it was trying too hard at every moment and still failing. The novel reads like a mix between a Daphne du Maurier classic and Vladimir Nobokov’s ‘Lolita,’ but somehow the worst parts of both.

I honestly felt more disgusted by the way our protagonist Richard described his young wife than the way Lolita’s Humbert described his young nymphette stepdaughter. And yet in Orkney, it was played completely seriously, we weren’t meant to feel absolutely disgusted at the way 60-year-old Richard described lusting over his young 20-something bride. Just the way he described her ‘pure skin’ made me feel like I was stumbling on the journals of a perverted old man.

I thought that the way our narrator spoke, this had to take place in the times of Rebecca or the Great Gatsby where speaking like a grandiose cartoon character was somewhat more in fashion, but no—our narrator mentions the internet. So we’re forced to bring a story that would have made perfect sense taking place in a previous century into the modern age for literally no reason.

Combined with all the water metaphors—yes, we GET it, Orkney is an island, there’s lots of dark water, water everywhere—but this book will not stop shoving them at you. I felt like I was drowning it it’s pretentious waters.

None of the characters had much substance, and I found fighting through each page to be tedious and chore like. I only kept turning in hopes there would be some wild twist—maybe his young bride killed a man and buried him at sea, or maybe she is a mythical siren tasked with luring her lover to his watery grave—All of these would have at least made me chugging through 180 pages of hollow, lifeless water metaphors worth it, but no, nothing of that level of excitement is ever revealed, and so of course it wasn’t worth it.

Was she a mermaid? A siren? An evil creature?

The very questions that pulled me into this book were the very ones I found not giving a damn about toward the end. I was desperate to get to the last page thinking there might be an answer or something that would make wasting these three hours of my life worthwhile. But as you can probably guess, it just kind of ends.

I have a feeling many people picked this book up because they have been to Orkney or have always wanted to go and are intrigued by this book’s location. Don’t let this fool you folks. This could have taken place on any remote island and the story would not have changed a bit. I almost feel like the author put Orkney into the title so people like me would see some familiarity and be more interested in the book.

So, final conclusions? Don’t waste your time. Reads like a perverted old man’s mermaid fanfiction but even that description makes it sound more exciting than the snooze fest it was. I could barely keep my eyes open, let alone turn the next page. Orkney was by far the most disappointing book I’ve read in a long time.

[Silvia · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’m not really sure of what to make of this book, except that I found it quite disappointing. Orkney is a novel about love, obsession and the fine line between the two, and it’s more about what’s said between the line than the story itself. A sixty-something academic, Richard, has just married one of his young and bright students, a woman with silver hair around whom the whole story revolves but who’s never named. They are on one of the Orkney islands for their honeymoon, a location picked by the narrator’s wife probably for some reason related to her past and family history, which is also never fully disclosed. Richard goes on at length describing his young wife, how they met, how she moves, her mysterious past, how they have sex. He spends most of his days working on his book and watching his wife contemplating the sea outside.

With a very poetic and fairytale-like narration, the books begins as a sweet – even if slightly claustrophobic – description of a middle-aged man’s love for his young wife, but it slowly turns into a much bleaker and disturbing story. You quickly realise that Richard is more interested in creating a story rather than in reality, in the image of her he’s created in his mind rather than her as person. The lengthy memories of events in their relationship are often contradicted by the young woman: he recalls her wearing a purple jumper, but she denies ever owning one; he often talks about being woken up by his wife to have sex in the middle of the night, while she says the opposite, and there’s the suspicion it is a more violent business than Richard lets on. There is a lot left unsaid and open to the reader’s interpretation in the book, including the ending, and lots of questions unanswered – why, for instance, did the young woman married her professor forty years her senior?

There is a lot of food for thought in the book, but at a very superficial level absolutely nothing happens in a way that I found excruciating. I kept reading out of sheer willpower, because I’d wanted to read this book for ages, but I was never engaged. The book dragged and dragged, to the point that I didn’t even care about the interesting elements in it. I don’t think it’s objectively a terrible book, but it just didn’t work for me.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reviewed February 2013:

Amy Sackville's debut, The Still Point, was probably my favourite new read in 2011 (despite the fact it was up against strong competition from Sarah Hall's The Beautiful Indifference, Ann Patchett's State of Wonder and Belinda McKeon's Solace) and I was thrilled when I heard she had written a second novel. And it would be unfair to say that Orkney disappoints. True, I don't think it's as good as her debut, but then few books are; what's odd, I suppose, is that this feels slighter, more experimental, a little more overwritten, and so more like a debut, I suppose. But having said that, Orkney deals beautifully and economically with themes that inspire many novelists but which often fail to translate into very good novels, and Sackville deserves kudos for that.

Richard, an eminent professor of English in his sixties, has married one of his students, a captivating, silver-haired girl of twenty-one who has recently graduated and who is never referred to by name. At her request, they are honeymooning on an (also unnamed) island in Orkney, where, far from getting to know his new wife better, Richard finds that she is becoming increasingly strange to him, and increasingly drawn towards water. With this as a linking thread, Orkney tackles retellings and reflections of traditional northern stories about women and men from the sea; the two most prominent models are stories of selkie wives, where a fisherman steals the woman's sealskin so that she will be forced to stay with him on the land, and of the male finfolk, who 'come ashore sometimes, to seek new wives upon the land. And when they've had their fill, away they sail... But... they always come back, to reclaim the little webbed daughters they've fathered on the land'. However, these two stories, told by Richard's unnamed wife, are far from the only models of mermaids and sea-folk referenced in the novel, as Richard's academic interests enable him to name-drop numerous myths; Melusine, Undine, water nymphs and Lamia. He also alludes to Matthew Arnold's 'The Forsaken Merman', which tells the story of a merman who married a human wife; she bore his children and lived with him beneath the sea, but eventually deserted him for the land. Therefore, the disappearance of women into both the earth or the sea is a continuous theme, less about their final destination than the fact of their loss.

Like Susan Fletcher's recent novel, The Silver Dark Sea, Orkney utilises rich, apt, but sometimes over-abundant descriptions of the shore and sea as it plays with the possibility that these old stories are true. We are led to believe that this new wife may actually be a selkie, or a daughter of the finfolk - her unknown father was said to have drowned, and Richard knows little of the rest of her family. Richard himself plays the part of the possessive fisherman perfectly, demonising every man that his wife comes into contact with, wondering how he will cope with a married life where she will have interests outside him, and controlling their collective memory of the relationship. When his wife insists that she was not wearing a purple sweater at their first meeting at one of his seminars, he mentally rewrites this: 'it is such a pleasure to dwell on the tale alone, while she is in her bath, and not here to interject with her nonsense about not wearing purple.' He objectifies her and makes her animalistic in turn: she is 'a tiny, perfect, whittled trinket found bedded in the sand', a 'sly little pup'; when he comes into the bathroom when she's taking a bath, he enters 'the sweet salt-steam of her lair.' Her shapeless woollen clothing, and his consideration of the 'marmoreal' form underneath them, recalls the selkie stories, and Richard's possessiveness is historical: he remembers childhood trips to the seaside and how he would accumulate 'a shoe-box full of half-eaten sticks of rock, carefully kept for later. Each one with my name struck right through the centre... this sticky log pile growing stickier by the week and finally, alarmingly furred over'.

However, the novel does not try to be a simple retelling of just one of these sea stories, and this is one of its strengths; even at the end, when the wife inevitably disappears, we are left to believe that she may have drowned, rather than reclaiming her selkie heritage and making for the waves. By not trying to line up any given folktale with her story, Sackville lays claim to a richer resonance, and I think this is one of the reasons that Orkney worked better for me than The Silver Dark Sea. Also, Sackville is clearly a stronger writer than Fletcher. To an extent, both the books suffer from similar flaws - they can both feel a little repetitive even as they build atmosphere, as the authors dwell on a remote island landscape, and descriptions can be over-egged - but Sackville's strength of imagery, characterisation, and greater clarity pull her book up to a different level. The main problem with her descriptive writing, I would say, is not that it is flawed in itself but that there is simply too much of it; again and again she pulls out wonderful images, like Richard's imagining of his much-loved, much-abused desk sinking into the sea as he abandons academia: 'drawers lolling open, streaming seaweed as it fell... until it settled on the bottom, redundant, a wrecked ship, coral-crusted, beaded with tiny bubbles.' The occasional raw physicality of her writing steers it away from sentimentality, which Fletcher is too often guilty of when writing about love: when his wife puts on an apron, Richard thinks 'It has a pretty red heart stitched on the chest to protect or conceal the mass of valves and chambers inside.' As the book draws to a close, as well, she makes good use of gaps in the text to show the gradual disintegration of Richard's world, something which can be over-done but I think she handles well.

If there is a single flaw in this novel, it is that it needs an anchor; it can seem to get a little lost in its own heaving seas. Sometimes, it is the wife that plays this role. Richard often simply reports his own speech 'Perhaps in a while, I said' - but hers usually gets speech marks, and provides a refreshing interruption to Richard's increasingly turbulent narrative with gentle humour or basic everyday comments. While Richard obsessively romanticises her, her actions resist this; she can't cook, tries to eat horrible childhood sweets, and tells him 'I'm sorry I didn't stay in the picture' when she moves outside the sight of the window he's been watching her from. She also relates the two long stories about the selkies and finfolk that form the core of a narrative. Ironically, despite her associations with the sea, her presence is grounding, and perhaps this is at the heart of the story after all. Perhaps it is Richard who is the forsaken merman rather than she the hapless selkie; perhaps he has left her for the sea and his ideas of the sea-creature that she is, rather than recognising her as an earthly human woman, and not his to own.

Re-read February 2023: I essentially agree with what I wrote before, but I do think this book is too long; although the fairytale repetition is deliberate, it could stand to lose fifty pages. In terms of the ending: While I think it is most likely that the wife drowned herself or, more magically, returned to the sea as a selkie, I'd like also to think there's a chance that she simply left the island, and Richard; that he is the one wrapping the sea around her and she the one who just wants to live an ordinary life, as I suggested in the last paragraph of my original review.