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Doggerland

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Mesolithic people populated Doggerland. Archaeologists and anthropologists say the Doggerlanders were hunter-gatherers who migrated with the seasons, fishing, hunting, and gathering food such as hazelnuts and berries. 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 setting – an offshore rig, a vast wind farm in the North Sea. Nothing to see but turbines and saltwater for miles around. Doggerland is a compelling, finely crafted novel about isolation, selflessness and hope in hopeless circumstances. An impressive debut. 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.

Doggerland by Ben Smith | Goodreads Doggerland by Ben Smith | Goodreads

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: The characterisations – the two taciturn figures in this story are ciphers, we never learn much about them. Their emotional and psychological state is mostly left up to the reader’s inference. 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. This book is possibly a definite contender for the bleakest book I have read in years. Set in the future on a slowly breaking down wind farm maintained as much as possible by the Old Man and the Boy whose names remain a mystery for most of the book. To say that not much is happening would be unfair (there is actually a lot of action here) but everything crumbles in slow motion and there is not much either person can do against it. The comparisons to The Road are spot-on; this future is bleak and narrow in the way th world can be seen by the protagonists. The atmosphere is equally distressing and overwhelming while the language remains a sharp edge that can dazzle the reader.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.

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

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. Evidence of Doggerlanders’ nomadic presence can be found embedded in the seafloor, where modern fishermen often find ancient bones and tools that date to about 9,000 years ago. These artifacts brought Doggerland’s submerged history to the attention of British and Dutch archaeologists and paleontologists.

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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: 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? 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. 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.

Doggerland - The Europe That Was - National Geographic Society Doggerland - The Europe That Was - National Geographic Society

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. 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. 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? 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).

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) 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’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. Their days are mundane: travelling around the farm in their rechargeable boat, carrying out repairs for 'The Company', keeping the blades turning, eating bland manufactured food, playing pool, dredging the seabed for useless items. All there is, apart from the water, is their clipped conversation and the quarterly visit from a supply boat.

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

I received an ARC of this book courtesy of NetGalley and HarperCollins UK/ 4th Estate in exchange for an honest review. 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 13I liked the relationship between the Old Man and Young Boy but felt I wanted more from them. I wanted to know more about them and I enjoyed their dialogue. The setting is the not-too-far-distant future on a vast offshore wind farm in the North Sea where two men (The Old Man and The Boy - they are named, but their names are rarely used) work as maintenance engineers. They are almost entirely alone and the boy is only there because his father, who previously worked there, disappeared mysteriously and The Company (whoever they may be) sent the boy to replace him. The relationship between the old man and the boy is a key element of the story as it develops. The old man scours the sea bed for lost things and talks repeatedly of how it all used to be dry land around them. The boy begins to search for evidence of his father. Suddenly, an opportunity for escape arises, but to say more would be to spoil the story.

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