Doggerland

Product Information

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:

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

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.

This wonderfully inventive debut novel with its themes of loneliness and hope, environment and survival, can be enjoyed on several levels; from a Robinson Crusoe type adventure, to an awareness of the imminent dangers facing the planet as the climate changes and our use of plastic. Set on a wind farm in the near future it’s not a difficult cast list to get familiar with, The Boy, no longer a boy as he was when he arrived at the farm, The Old Man, and the Pilot who arrives every few months with supplies. 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 boy has been sent by the Company to take his place, but the question of where he went and why is one for which the Old Man will give no answer. The prose – unadorned, almost flat, often technical. Quite a lot about turbines and nacelles, gunwales and gantries. More poetic interstices describe the glacial melt that flooded Doggerland over the course of millennia, cutting Britain off from continental Europe.

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

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 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:

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. 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. 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. Using sophisticated seismic survey data acquired mainly by oil companies drilling in the North Sea, the scientists have been able to reconstruct a digital model of nearly 46,620 square kilometers (18,000 square miles) of what Doggerland looked like before it was flooded.

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

Doggerland was an area of land, now submerged beneath the southern North Sea, that connected Great Britain to continental Europe. It was flooded by rising sea levels around 6,500–6,200 BC. Geological surveys have suggested that it stretched from Britain's east coast to the Netherlands and the western coasts of Germany and the peninsula of Jutland.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. Doggerland isn’t a setting conjured up by the author, but an area of land that once connected Great Britain to continental Europe. It is now submerged beneath North Sea after being flooded by rising sea levels around 6,500–6,200 BCE but was hitherto a rich habitat colonised by humans during the Mesolithic period. Something similar appears to be taking place on the mainland, though the protagonists haven’t returned home or seen the coastline since taking up their positions and know next to nothing about events in the wider world. 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

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

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? Graham Phillips’s well-researched, well-written book neatly places a number of missing pieces in the puzzle of the Orkney megalithic tradition and the broader ancient region of Doggerland. He presents these in context with a range of informative viewpoints on prediluvian cultures including Atlantis, Mu, and Lemuria.” 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. 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.

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. 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. 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 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. 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.