Doggerland

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This strange, new world is made stranger still by the purposely constrained stage against which the narrative plays out. Smith focuses on two main characters, maintenance men on an enormous wind farm out in the North Sea, who lead a solitary existence on a decrepit rig amongst the rusting turbines. Although we are given their names, they are generally referred to in the novel as “the Boy” and “the Old Man”. Early on in the book, we are told that of course, the boy was not really a boy, any more than the old man was all that old; but the names are relative, and out of the grey, some kind of distinction was necessary. It’s a significant observation, because much of the novel’s undeniable power derives from a skilful use of a deliberately limited palette. The men’s life is marked by a sense of claustrophobia, the burden of an inescapable fate. The monotony of the routine is only broken by occasional visits of the Supply Boat and its talkative “Pilot”, who is the only link with what remains of the ‘mainland’. The struggle to keep the turbines working with limited resources becomes an image of the losing battle against the rising oceans, at once awesome and terrible in their vastness. The Romantic notion of the Sublime is given an environmentalist twist. One can smell the rust and smell the sea-salt. In a recent article I quoted from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale about societal changes happening so slowly they are almost imperceptible, or as she put it far more vividly: “in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it.” It strikes me this is what Smith has endeavoured to demonstrate in his novel. Civilization, once so progressive and dynamic, is now, much like this immense, expiring windfarm, corroded and all but unsalvageable.

Book of the Month (Doggerland Fatal Isles: Sunday Times Crime Book of the Month (Doggerland

This was an original, moving and complex human story. It centres on a young man (called 'the boy' throughout the narrative) whose job it is to look after and repair the turbines on a wind farm. The plot is slow-moving because obviously nothing much happens out on the farm. This is more of a thought-provoking and emotional piece about family and commitment, and what different people will do to escape from or face up to their responsibilities. The fourth character is Jem's father, whose job Jem is now doing and who disappeared some years early, and Jem's chance discoveries lead him to investigate what really happened, what lies beyond the small patch of sea they inhabit, to understand why the old man is more interested in trawling the sea bed for plastic relics than contributing to their Sisyphean job.The boy had once found him prying the letters off one of the rig’s warning signs and scattering them into the vats. He said the brew needed more character.” A lot of the writing is poetic in nature. Smith imports a few words from other languages (I think that’s where they come from!) and is not, it seems, averse to making up some new words. “Gurrelly” may or may not be a typo, but whatever it is, it should stay in the book as it is a magnificent word! In the first few chapters, I kept highlighting passages and making a note that said “cinematic”: Smith’s writing draws vivid images in your mind and it is hard not to see some passages as clips from a movie. For example, try to read this without imagining a camera pulling away from the boy to expose the vastness of the sea around him: This book shares with “The Road” the sparseness and bleakness of the prose, with the brutality and futility of much of what has happened and the world that has resulted from it, just occasionally offset by glimpses of empathy and sympathy between the characters and a tenuous sense of hope. A boy who is no longer really a boy. An old man who isn’t as sharp as he once was. A lonely rig in an endless sea of gradually failing wind turbines, towering above a sunken land. The old man is a victim of his lonely trade. The boy is becoming one, although he has a quest, to find out what happened to his father. The Company forced the boy to take on his father’s contract when he disappeared.

Doggerland | Book by Graham Phillips | Official The Mystery of Doggerland | Book by Graham Phillips | Official

This book has been on my to read list for a while, and is a rather impressive debut, if not the most cheerful of books to be reading over Christmas. In the North Sea, far from what remains of the coastline, a wind farm stretches for thousands of acres. This book is very strange and detached. The extreme dystopian setting means that life for the characters is very different to anything we would experience, and so the story is unusual and unpredictable. Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13 was set in a Peak District village, and measured the how the quotidian dramas of a large cast of villagers played out against the rhythmic seasons of village life and the natural world, while time continues to pass incessantly. The title Doggerland prompts more questions than it answers. I was aware of the area of dry land that used to connect Britain to Europe before it was flooded when the ice retreated and that now lies under the North Sea. I was aware that prehistoric artefacts have long been discovered off the British and Dutch coasts, and reading this story led to me spending a happy hour looking into it all online. I loved the way the author amalgamates these and other hints of ancient events into a futuristic novel about a world undergoing a slow but relentless apocalypse, and maybe renewal - really fascinating and thought-provoking.The idea of a submerged world resonates with mythical and poetic associations and, as a result, “Doggerland” lends itself well as the title of Ben Smith’s debut novel. The work, in fact, portrays an unspecified but seemingly not-so-distant future, where global warming and rising sea levels (possibly exacerbated by some other cataclysm) have eroded the coastline and brought to an end civilisation as we know it. This book is set on a wind farm some time in the future, or in an alternative world possibly - it's hard to be sure and this is never actually confirmed. In this place the water level eventually rises so that there is very little land left; the land the wind farm was built on is partially submerged. Those studying the Doggerland area are finding that the climate change faced by Mesolithic people is analogous to our own. Mesolithic peoples were forced out of Doggerland by rising water that engulfed their low-lying settlements. Climate scientists say that a similar situation could affect the billions of people who live within 60 kilometers (37 miles) of a shoreline today, if polar ice caps continue to melt at an accelerated pace. I love a dystopian fable, thus ‘Doggerland’ easily caught my attention. It has an intriguing and original setting: a vast decaying wind farm in the middle of the polluted North Sea. Amid the turbines is a rig where two repairmen live, one young and one old. They battle entropy with a single bag of tools and await supplies from the distant mainland. Although I found the whole book very atmospheric, it is also aggressively minimalist. Only four human beings are even mentioned in the text (all men) and events are strictly limited in number and spatial extent. There is also very little dialogue. While I respect the claustrophobic effect this has, it diminished my engagement with the narrative. Can it be that this young man really remembers so little of his past and has so little curiosity about the wider world? Why is the old man so mysterious? Do the pair of them ever get paid?