Doggerland

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It took me a little while before I started to enjoy Doggerland – was the most exciting moment really going to be when the boy found a shoe in his fishing net?

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. They carry out their never-ending work as the waves roll, dragging strange shoals of flotsam through the turbine fields. A strange, haunting and poetic tale perhaps set thousands of years in the future where most of the planet seems to be covered by sea. My thanks to HarperCollins UK for an advanced copy via NetGalley of this debut novel from Ben Smith. The Boy fishes with a makeshift line that catches only floating plastic and old boots and throws himself with professional pride into the hopeless task of maintaining the dwindling field of still functional wind turbines.With the onset of the Holocene, our current era, Doggerland's inhabitants were increasingly confronted with climate change and rising sea levels, just as we are today. Besides the personal ambition of escaping and finding out his father’s fate, Jem asks himself relatively few questions about the world in which he finds himself. It’s a significant observation, because much of the novel’s undeniable power derives from a skilful use of a deliberately limited palette.

I understand I can change my preference through my account settings or unsubscribe directly from any marketing communications at any time. Doggerland is a superbly gripping debut novel about loneliness and hope, nature and survival – set on an off-shore windfarm in the not-so-distant future. Although we are given their names, they are generally referred to in the novel as “the Boy” and “the Old Man”.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.

At the mercy of the weather at the midway point of the novel, both characters are confined to the rig, unable to tend to the turbine fields or find the answers they seek. 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. Ben Smith lives in Cornwall and is a lecturer in creative writing at Plymouth University, specializing in environmental literature and focusing particularly on oceans, climate change and the ‘Anthropocene’.In his glimpse into the past millennia of the ice age, Smith emphasises the ultimate irrelevance of human activity to natural forces. The enigmatic Pilot, garrulous, well-fed, and self-serving illustrates the corruption in a trade system where everyone demands a profit margin. He examines evidence of Doggerland’s high-temperature technology, showing how its people were able to melt solid rock to create vitrified structures far stronger than concrete, a technique that modern science cannot replicate. On our site, you can find not only book reviews but author interviews, cover reveals, excerpts from books, acquisition announcements, guest posts by your favourite authors, and so much more. As well as both being dystopias, Doggerland (like The Road) gives a lot of pages to the description of tiny details and a blow by blow account of each day where very little of importance or significance generally happens.