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Doggerland

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But these niggles aside, there is something memorable about Doggerland. It is an unremittingly wet book, damp and cold and rusted, blasted by waves and tempests, but also warm, generous and often genuinely moving. It is a debut of considerable force, emotional weight and technical acumen that weaves its own impressive course. Its occupants, a duo humbly labelled as ‘the boy’ and ‘the old man’, manage a forest of wind turbines surrounded by the endlessly churning ocean and a brooding confinement that ebbs and flows. Here, time erodes at a gruelling pace as they surrender to the predictability of one another’s company.

Doggerland by Ben Smith – review | Fiction | The Guardian Doggerland by Ben Smith – review | Fiction | The Guardian

The Boy’s father once worked on the farm but disappeared in puzzling circumstances. Consequently, the son was sent by the Company to fulfil his contract, but where he went remains a mystery and the Old Man is loath to discuss the matter. And the comparison with Waiting for Godot comes from there being two men waiting and waiting while not very much happens. However, this is less true than the bleakness, because there is action and plot movement through this story. There is also humour in the writing. You can’t go wrong with a good old English pun which comes when discussing the “homebrew” that the old man concocts from all kinds of bizarre (and dangerous) ingredients:The use of “cleat” here is indicative of the way Smith builds his sentences, a sense that he has absorbed the technical manuals of how to fix turbines, rig a boat or troubleshoot an electrical circuit, without ever feeling the need to show off his research. It is an impressive achievement, though one that he might have applied more keenly to the political situation on the mainland. 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. What a wonderful novel. An old man and a boy live their lives on a rig in the north sea, repairing turbines on a giant wind farm. An ecological event has seen the world ripped of its resources, only plastic and electricity seem in rich health.

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

At times, Doggerland reminded me of Megan Hunter’s The End We Start From, which also describes a future marked by rising water levels. However, whereas Hunter’s vision, with its images of creation, birth and maternity, is ultimately a hopeful one, Smith’s is devoid of any feminine figure, suggesting a sterility in the human condition which can only lead to its annihilation. Doggerland is haunting in its bleakness: The other author that I was reminded of though was the WWII naval stories of Douglas Reeman(as well as the brilliant Alistair MacLean’s debut HMS Ulysses – just as those books are dominated by lengthy expositions of naval action featuring copious use of naval terms, passages which I felt I never comprehended and which spoilt my enjoyment, I found myself here skipping large chunks of text around nacelles, engine components and boat maintenance. And ultimately that dampened my enjoyment of the book. It’s strangely compelling. The seas and fields of turbines are part of the landscape, and characters in their own right. Having spent many hours gazing at the North Sea, I felt at home in this landscape, but awfully afraid of what might happen, or not happen, which was worse. The plot development is deliberately very limited – The Boy finding a little more about his Father and having to decide whether he follows his desire to escape to the open seas. For The Old Man it is the distant past – he dredges the sea to extract prehistoric artefacts from the eponymous land mass long ago submerged under the North Sea ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland)

Table of Contents

In the North Sea, far from what remains of the coastline, a wind farm stretches for thousands of acres. 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: Doggerland is the name given in the 1990s to an area of land, now submerged beneath the North Sea, which connected Great Britain to Continental Europe. Doggerland once extended to modern-day Denmark and far north to the Faroe Islands. It was a grassland roamed by mammoth, lion, red deer – and their human hunters – but melting ice turned it into an area of marshes and wetlands before it was finally and definitively claimed by the waves around 8,000 years ago. (Incidentally, Doggerland was recently in the news following exciting archaeological discoveries). 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.

Doggerland: The History of the Land that Once Connected Great Britain Doggerland: The History of the Land that Once Connected Great

The chronic tedium of their routine keeps a steady course throughout and is carried along on alternating currents of futility and hope, while the narrative shifts between the past and present to reveal the prospect of a desperately punishing future. 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 novel has a very distinctive setting and premise: a boy and an old man fixing turbines at a wind farm in the North Sea, living in very cruel conditions on a rig. They’re isolated from the rest of the world besides a pilot who brings them food and equipment every now and then. Some references to the “Company” and Chinese. While the world beyond these rows of turbines remains a mystery, the historical “Doggerland” in the title of the novel, combined with the modern wind farm setting, signals a dystopian vision of the Anthropocene. Thank you Wikipedia: While Smith provides glimpses of what has happened to the world at large – a corporation, rather hokily called “the Corporation”, appears to be in charge of everything – it never quite coalesces into a coherent, persuasive whole. It’s fine for the boy not to know what’s really going on, but Smith never quite convinces that he knows himself. There are also interludes throughout the book that provide a history of Doggerland that add little to the narrative and sail close to self-indulgence. In Doggerland, Ben Smith has created a vision of the future in which the world ends with neither a bang nor a whimper but just rusts gradually into the sea. I found it both terrifying and hugely enjoyable, as well as tremendously moving. Ben Smith's writing is incredibly precise; working with a restricted palette of steel greys and flaking blues, he paints the boundaried seascape with vivid detail. This is a story about men and fathers, the faint consolation of routine, and the undying hope of finding out what lies beyond the horizon. I absolutely loved it. Jon McGregor, author of Reservoir 13 In the North Sea, a wind farm stretches for thousands of acres; the coastline, or what remains of it is far from here. Two men are responsible for maintaining all of these turbines, one younger is called the boy, though he has outgrown that title now. The other is the Old Man, who has been there for almost longer than he can remember. I also shy away from describing the plot. So little action takes place that to reveal any of it would be to spoil others’ experience of the book. The author’s outstanding creation for me is the atmosphere of the story - claustrophobic, despite its setting, and fraught with danger. There are only three characters and a degree of mystery surrounds all of them - how did they end up on the turbine farm?, what lives did they lead before? And, of course, central to it all, what lives could they live outside the farm?, what is out there beyond the last turbine?

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

The comparison with The Road comes from the setting which is the not-too-far-distant future when the sea has become a dead place and where our two protagonists live a lonely existence with only occasional visits from a supply ship. It is bleak, it is depressing: Sanity and resolve patiently weather the bleak and hostile location of a decaying oceanic platform, until monotony casts off and drifts beyond its dependable boundary. It is a hard life of boredom and constraint, a job unremitting in its demands, but beneath it there is a seam of intrigue. Some years before, the boy’s father disappeared while working on the same rig. It’s clear that the old man knows more than he is letting on, but it is some loaded comments by the pilot that prompt the boy to investigate what really happened. The context – sometime in the future sea levels have risen. Vague suggestions of the wider world now controlled by ‘the Company’ and an occasional word in Mandarin are the few hints provided. The plot – minimal. I won’t give away what happens but don’t go into this one expecting thrills and spills.

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. 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. 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. A scientific exploration of the advanced ancient civilization known as Doggerland or Fairland that disappeared 5,000 years ago.

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