The Untrue Island Re-visited: Three Encounters with Orford Ness

Abstract

The present paper deals with three texts inspired by the topography and secretive military history of the East Anglian offshore shingle spit Orford Ness. Each may be considered a specific example of a hybrid genre. The first part presents Robert Macfarlane’s Ness (2019) as an explicitly eco-centric and experimental poetic response to this unique territory. The poem’s five “more-than-human forms” are related to the notions of haecceities, the smooth space, Aeon, and the concept of rhizomes in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. The latter part of this article focuses on Polly Crosby’s fictional island Dohhalund from her second novel, The Unravelling (2022). Though this novel is referred to as a historical mystery, it clearly does not represent the traditional whodunit genre. First, the treatment of Orford Ness in Crosby’s text will be confronted with another hybrid of a book, W. G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn (1995), a novel acknowledged by Crosby as a major influence. The final section shifts focus to Crosby’s island setting as a site of transformation, offering a surprisingly non-anthropocentric perspective comparable to that of Macfarlane’s Ness.