Doggerland

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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. 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. The flooded world Smith creates is wholly, bleakly persuasive. The prose is simple, at least on the surface, but the cadence of the sentences, their honed style, is perfectly matched to its barren, sinister setting. Smith writes boredom and unease brilliantly, but also has the steel to write action sequences with verve and precision. 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. I can’t better Jon McGregor’s contribution to the publisher’s blurb for this book and take the liberty of reproducing it here.

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

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.

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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: New marine archaeological evidence has revealed the remains of a large land mass to the north of Britain that hosted an advanced civilization 1,000 years before the recognized “first” civilizations of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, or India. Remembered in Celtic legends as Tu-lay, and referred to by geologists as Doggerland or Fairland, this civilization began at least as early as 4000 BC but was ultimately destroyed by rising sea levels, huge tsunamis, and a terrible viral epidemic released from melting permafrost during a cataclysmic period of global warming. Doggerland is brilliantly inventive, beautifully-crafted and superbly gripping debut novel about loneliness and hope, nature and survival—set on an off-shore windfarm in the not-so-distant future. 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 by Ben Smith – review | Fiction | The Guardian Doggerland by Ben Smith – review | Fiction | The Guardian

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. 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. 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 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. 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 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 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. 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.