Doggerland

Product Information

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. 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. I received an ARC of this book courtesy of NetGalley and HarperCollins UK/ 4th Estate in exchange for an honest review. 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.

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

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 It’s strangely compelling. The seas and fields of turbines are part of the landscape, and characters in their own right. Having spent many hours gazing at the North Sea, I felt at home in this landscape, but awfully afraid of what might happen, or not happen, which was worse.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. 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.

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

I can’t better Jon McGregor’s contribution to the publisher’s blurb for this book and take the liberty of reproducing it here. The boy had once found him prying the letters off one of the rig’s warning signs and scattering them into the vats. He said the brew needed more character.” 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.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.