Doggerland

Product Information

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. In the North Sea, far from what remains of the coastline, a wind farm stretches for thousands of acres. For The Boy it is a search for his father – previously The Old Man’s partner, and whose place he is required to take I 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. 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.

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

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? 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. 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. 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.” The boy was sent there by the company to replace his father who worked there before him and who vanished one day. He has many questions about why and where he went, but there are no answers forthcoming from the Old Man. Until one day he finds a clue that he has been looking for as to what happened to his father.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: 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:

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

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.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. 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: As the Old Man dredges the sea for lost things, the Boy sifts for the truth of his missing father. Until one day, from the limitless water, a plan for escape emerges… 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.