Swanvale Halt Book Club: Review, PJ Harvey, 'Orlam' (Picador, 2022)

When Polly Harvey was four, she found a dead lamb in the woods near her house: the crows had pecked its eyes out. At home, her parents had just bought Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon and had it on the turntable endlessly. Thereafter, she said, that record never failed to make her feel physically sick; though it took until the 2010s before she would admit in interviews why it did. Harvey takes this horrible experience and spins out of it her second collection of poetry, Orlam.

Her protagonist Ira-Abel Rawles is nine, and lives in the fictional Dorset village of UNDERWHELEM – in the text, it’s always capitalised, as though in a print transcription of Domesday Book. It’s a place where females and animals are never safe from predation of different kinds. Not that Ira thinks of herself as female, as her double name suggests – she’s a ‘not-gurrel’, she insists, a ‘wether on the nether-edge’ who should have been born a ‘tarble tup’, and who identifies with Joan of Arc as well as the lambs she has a reluctant hand (literally) in castrating. That sexual ambiguity will not protect her. All this also opens out of Harvey’s childhood, though I hope not much of the rest of the story does, or I doubt she’ll ever be able to show her face in her home village of Corscombe again (1).

I say ‘story’, and that is what Orlam is – a verse novel spanning a calendar year and written, as the quotes so far make clear, in old Dorset dialect mainly lifted from William Barnes’s 1886 Dictionary; so the ‘tarble tup’ Ira imagines she might have been is, in what Barnes would have called ‘book-English’, a ‘tolerable ram’. Readers should not imagine that Harvey would actually have heard much of this during her real 1970s Dorset upbringing, beyond perhaps the odd word: instead it’s a very conscious anachronism that allows the author to prise open Ira’s experience, its earthy Anglo-Saxon shapes generating a very particular relationship between that, the landscape, and the people around her. The dialect doesn’t entirely lift us away from West Dorset in the 1970s – the jerrycans and sheep-dip chemicals see to that – but it gives that setting a depth and resonance which makes it seem a landscape of myth.

Ira creates her own myths, to cope with the horrors she encounters. The dead lamb’s eyeball becomes Orlam, her guardian spirit, floating over the fields on its trailing optic nerve; in the only place she finds refuge, Gore Woods, she meets the bleeding Civil War soldier Wyman-Elvis and his entourage of ghosts, and the Ash-Wraiths, the shades of every child who has ever played there. She ‘scratches’ out her myths, her sorrows and enmities, writing to take control of what she undergoes. She needs these spectral allies, because she has few enough among the human residents of Underwhelem. She loves her mother, but her mother is neglectful and absent; she loves her grandmother (called Mary, like Harvey’s own), but Mary is dead, and hovers over the hollow lane; she adores her elder brother Kane-Jude, but he betrays her (predestined by his names, Cain and Judas). The rest, from Ira’s drunken, inadequate father Chalmers-Adam, to Emerson-Dogger Bowditch who rapes her in the Red Shed, are deserving objects of her scorn and hatred. She casts spells against them (apparently successfully in her father’s case), and makes songs to defend herself. It’s a mythology woven from plants and wildlife, the details of sheep-rearing, Shakespeare, pop songs and weather rhymes, Christian imagery, and Dorset folklore (2), and makes a heady enough mix – though the intoxicant isn’t good old Dorset cider, but the cheap whisky and Palmer’s bitter served up in Underwhelem’s grotty pub, the Golden Fleece.

I often find that I have to reorientate myself to get into a new PJ Harvey album, and this book turned out the same: it took me three reads before it really gelled. It isn’t hard to read: you can tackle it quite quickly, and in fact I think it helps to read it quickly, once you’re familiar with the rich but restricted vocabulary of the dialect. Polly’s mentor Don Paterson’s simultaneous ‘English’ translations of her words are best ignored as they will mislead you into one particular reading of a multivocal text. I found at first that the poem’s conventions, such as the capitalisation of placenames and the fabricated names of the characters, separated me from the emotion it should have contained, but after repeated readings those distractions faded. And they may only be Ira’s imaginings anyway, though Harvey has been rightly non-committal about that. So I got there, in the end.

But it is brutal. ‘Sex and death all roundabout/Sonny with ‘es eyes pecked out/Scoff the vlesh vlee and the yis/This is how the wordle is’. Ira excepted, all the living characters are grotesques, who seem to exist only to cause others pain, notably her. The miasma of horror barely lifts, whether it’s the dramatic hideousness of the pervert forester John Forsey dressing as the Dorset Ooser, or the more prosaic terrors of the new school term, which Ira dreads so much she throws up on her teacher’s shoes. The Christ-figure (that’s how Harvey describes him, not me) Wyman-Elvis hands The Word to Ira – in Presley’s phrase, love me tender, a marker of hope amid the evil, but she finds it hard to hold onto it. For all Orlam’s skill, its near-relentless morbidity is wearing, as though Harvey is working through something. Mind you, if this still doesn’t represent the mature outworking of her poetic voice, what might be to come?

The book ends with a recapitulation of its first lyric, ‘Prayer at the Gate’, in almost Christian terms:

So look before and look behind

At life and death all innertwined

And teake towards your dark-haired Lord

Forever bleeding with The Word.

By now, the end of the year and the beginning of a new one, Ira’s mother seems to have resurfaced, her father appears to have succumbed to the curse Ira laid on him, and the ghost of her childhood has joined the Ash-Wraiths while she carries on into a more knowing near-adolescence. And that’s as optimistic as Orlam gets. It is, I think, a brilliant achievement, but hard to take, and even harder – for me, yet – to love.

(There haven't been that many reviews of Orlam yet, either because people don't know what to make of it, or hate it but are too polite to say so. You can have a look at this one, or this, or this.)

1.Earnest Pollywatchers heard drafts of these poems as far back as 2017 when she read them at King’s Place in London. They've hardly altered, but where they have it's weakened the specific local references. So the early version of ‘Black Saturday’ described Ira and her brother playing war in ‘Luther’s Coppice’, a real location in Corscombe; in the book, this has become ‘Blaggot’s Copse’.

2.I especially like the references to the Red Post which in the book is ‘UNDERWHELEM’s hanging post’ (p.75). There are four real Red Posts in Dorset, roadside waymarkers, and because nobody really knows why they are coloured red, you can make up what you like. I think of them as the mystic axial points around which the county revolves, which rivet it into its past. The nearest to Corscombe is at Benville Bridge.