Origins of Desire in Orchid Fens
by Lynn Hutchinson Lee
Stelliform Press
197 pages
$20
“We invent or erase histories, tell the old fairytales and myths and come up with new ones.” Lynn Hutchinson Lee’s dreamlike debut novella, Origins of Desire in Orchid Fens, opens in a small town seen through the eyes of Orchid Lovell, a young Romani woman whose mother instilled in her a deep fear of her identity being revealed, her family having been chased out of towns before.
Despite being told through 100 mini-chapters, Origins of Desire in Orchid Fens manages a pace that never feels rushed—at times, it is achingly slow. The deliberate pace, though occasionally difficult to parse, adds to the slow-building tension that leads to the novella’s climax. It feels, much like Orchid notes after a particularly gruelling act of violence, “like a storm holding its breath.” Hutchinson Lee never lulls the reader into a false sense of security because nothing ever feels truly secure—we are always waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the storm to pick up again.
The novella feels reminiscent of Qiu Miaojin’s Notes of a Crocodile in the way it cultivates a particular emotional landscape, even when not directly connected. The atmosphere of Carminetown, the fictional town where Orchid and her mother live, is rendered in ethereal prose. At times, this language contrasts jarringly against more simplistic descriptions, but the dissonance maintains Orchid’s unsteadiness—as she struggles to come to terms with the violence around her, the reader does, too.
“The future is a refuge, hiding.” In Origins of Desire in Orchid Fens the future—the final outcome—remains uncertain until its final chapters, yet still feels earned. This is owed to the way the passage of time falls to the wayside, as some chapters run into the next with little acknowledgement of how much time has passed. While this augments the illusory feeling of the setting, it also leaves some aspects of the story underdeveloped. Orchid’s relationship with Jack Bachinski, a gold miner she meets in the fen, seems rushed in the beginning, but by the end I found myself compelled by their dynamic after seeing it through Orchid’s eyes.
While Orchid makes for a spellbinding narrator, the character I was most drawn to was her mother, whose voice permeates the text even when she’s not present. The excerpts of her unsent letters encapsulate what I loved most about the novella—despite how short the chapters are, each one lands with a visceral weight.
Origins of Desire in Orchid Fens is an engrossing read that left me sitting with its echoes long after I had turned the final page. “In the light of the day, so much is beautiful.”
