70 | SATURDAY | 30.04.22 | The Guardian
CULTURE BOOKS
D o r s e t d a z e
A musician’s vision of
a curious childhood
Liz Berr y
POETRY
Orlam
PJ Har ve y
PICADOR, £16.99
A
novel-in-verse written in dense
Dorset vernacular, Orlam is a
curious and enchanting thing.
Like a dark poetic almanac, it charts,
month by month, a year in which
its heroine, nine-year-old Ira-Abel
Rawles, leaves behind the innocence
of her childhood.
Orlam takes the reader by the hand,
with each poem laid out opposite its
“standard” translation and footnotes
to illuminate a hoard of folklore. This
doubling slows down the reader who
cares to be slowed, allowing them to
puzzle out the dialect words and the
way they change the poems.
Ira’s world is a magical realist
outpost of the West Country where
PJ Harvey grew up. Conjured through
tightly rhyming poems, often taking
the form of songs or incantations, the
village of Underwhelem appears:
“Voul village in a hag-ridden hollow.
/ All ways to it winding, all roads to
it narrow.” Like a more terrifying
Llareggub, Underwhelem is populated
by a large and peculiar cast of
characters. There’s Ira and her family;
their sinister neighbours ; ghostly civil
war soldiers; and the many presiding
spirits of woods and fi elds.
Amid the sheep farms and raggedy
pubs, Underwhelem is a place of
violence and superstition. At every turn
women, children and animals meet
with danger and sexual predation.
The book builds to the moment Ira is
assaulted in the ominous Red Shed,
an experience that propels her towards
the end of girlhood: “Once she was a
bandy rhyme / and ever free to roam, /
but now she’s cold-at-supper-time /
and’ll nevermore go hwome”.
Orlam is full of exquisite nature
poetry, and Harvey captures the
seasons and the fl ora and fauna with
lyricism and care. Ira’s attention to
nature makes her a beguiling narrator.
Dreading her return to the misery
of school, she sings to the birds for
comfort: “Help me dunnick, drush or
dove. / Love Me Tender. Tender Love.”
Other interludes, like her tiny poems
Things I Found in Gore Woods, are
equally charming, a child’s record
of dark treasures: “a reddick’s nest, /
wind-wrecked / on a rotting leaf bed”.
“O wildest, wildest wood / of
goodness and not good” – Gore Woods
are where Harvey creates her most vivid
poetry. Here Ira meets the ghost of a
Christ-like wounded soldier, Wyman-
Elvis, who becomes a symbol of faith
and salvation (his name and his
message, Love Me Tender, are no
coincidence). The woods are also
the home of Orlam, the oracle of
Underwhelem, a spirit manifested
from the eyeball of Ira’s beloved lamb,
planted high in an elm tree. There’s
something of Dead Papa Toothwort
from Max Porter’s Lanny here, a
rapturous, unsettling spirit of the green.
For Ira, Gore Woods are a place of
liberation. Ill-fi tting in life, she “yearns
... to un-gurrel”, and there she may do
so. It is to the woods she escapes after
her assault, and through the months
that follow the trees are companions
and protectors. In their care, she sheds
her girlhood, its restrictions and
dangers, and transforms into a freer,
truer self, a “not-girl/not-boy. Bride of
his Word”. And what is that word, we
wonder: tenderness, music, love,
scratching (as the poem calls writing)?
In that wonderful word “scratching”
we fi nd all that makes Orlam such an
intriguing book – Harvey’s visceral
art-making, her feel for mystery, and
commitment to vernacular. Not since
the poetry of William Barnes in the 19th
century has the dialect been used in this
sustained way. The words themselves
are a lovesome delight: soft and buzzy
in mouth and ear (zummer, yoller,
whiver, theasom), guttural and crude
when needed (maggoty, puxy, stumble
fuck). The glossary is its own poem.
When vernacular writing succeeds
it makes everything seem thrilling and
alive, unexpectedly subversive; what
the poet Tom Paulin described as
“a language impatient of print, an
orality which seeks to fl y through its
authoritarian net”. The trick is to make
it fresh. At times, this falters in Orlam.
The heady combination of dialect,
folklore, Biblical imagery and rhymechild, has a list of Cyril’s contact
numbers saved on her phone under
“Dad”, “DAD”, “Dad recent”, “Dad
THIS ONE”. Cyril is a well-drawn cad,
a “master of detachment” who aff ably
defl ects any personal responsibility.
People Person explores the legacy of
emotional damage wreaked upon his
fi ve adult children when an
unexpected event draws them all
together, as Dimple winds up in a dire
situation that requires her family’s
help. The narrative includes crime and
subterfuge, uncomfortable sexual
situations, and not one but two
funerals – yet despite all this, People
Person is a breezily enjoyable read
that foxes genre; a family comedy
in the guise of domestic noir, with
a redemptive fairytale journey from
alienation to acceptance at its heart.
In Queenie, Carty-Williams was
wonderfully eff ective at portraying
the joys and sorrows of Black British
femininity. Through the Penningtons,
she explores what it means to strive
for identity and belonging in a big,
broken family – part Indian-Jamaican,
part white, part Yoruba – united in
heartbreak by a selfi sh father fi gure
with an unknowable smile always
plastered across his face, and one
foot always out of the door.
Dimple, Lizzie, Nikisha, Danny
and Prynce have each handled Cyril’s
negligible presence in their lives
in diff erent, often clashing ways.
Dimple is also a “people person”, in
a quintessentially modern fashion.
A 30-year-old aspiring lifestyle
infl uencer mired in man troubles, she’s
accustomed to “lonely, sleepless nights
where her only company was digital”,
doomscrolling and “looking at all the
messages from people telling her either
how great she was or how and where
she could improve”. Defi ning herself
through a prism of follower counts and
male approval, Dimple has no idea who
she really is. Meanwhile Lizzie, born
three weeks apart from her half-sister,
appears to have it all held together as
a junior doctor in a loving and stable
lesbian relationship, and Nikisha, the
eldest, is a pragmatic no-nonsense
mother to two children (“she had very
little time for daddy issues, and actually
found the term off ensive”). Danny is
a taciturn gym buff , and Prynce is
shaping up to be a jocular ladies’ man,
much like his father.
The Pennington siblings chat and
bicker and spark off the page, coming
into their own distinctive aliveness.
By the end of the novel, the reader is
sorry to leave them; Nikisha and Danny
in particular deserve more airtime.
Carty-Williams’s prose is snappy and
propulsive, full of busy, telegenic set
pieces that dramatise current issues
with an enviable lightness of touch.
Racial discrimination within the
police, toxic relationships and
generational trauma are entertainingly
explored , and the novel is wittilyPJ Harvey’s Orlam
is written in Dorset
vernacularFICTIONFICTION
can push the poems into archaism,
making them seem runaway folk songs.
Yet when Harvey brings Ira’s world
back to the details of her late-70s,
early-80s girlhood we feel the book
spark again : Ira and her brother
Kane-Jude hanging around and getting
into trouble on a loose “Black Saturday”;
Ira standing in Gore Woods “in the
violet half-light ... by a car battery /
a jerry can / the electric fence”.
Harvey worked on Orlam for six years
and you can feel her passion running
through it. As Ira progresses through
the seasons Harvey returns us again and
again to that most moving image of her,
as a child being rushed from childhood,
a little “shepherd girl” full of longing
in the wild West Country, “conzumed
with twanketen [melancholy] / that’s
only eased by scratching ”.
To buy a copy for £14.78
go to guardianbookshop.comC
yril Pennington , the roving
Jamaican patriarch and shifty
centre of People Person , Candice
Carty-Williams ’s follow-up to her
bestselling debut Queenie , considers
himself “more of a people person than
a father”. He has fi ve children with
four diff erent women and zips around
south London in his gold Jeep,
ingratiating himself with everyone
but his own aggrieved off spring.
Dimple Pennington, the middlePeople Person
Candice Carty-Williams
TRAPEZE, £12.99Daddy issues
The legacy of a
gallivanting patriarch
Sharlene Teo
SEAMUS MURPHY