Doggerland

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For The Boy it is a search for his father – previously The Old Man’s partner, and whose place he is required to take 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. 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 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?

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

That this book was written by an author who also writes poetry, is impossible to overlook – the sentences are beautiful and unusual and by far my favourite thing about this book. The way Ben Smith’s prose flows reminded me of the ocean – something that has to be intentional given that the North Sea is as much of a protagonist as the three other people in this novel. A scientific exploration of the advanced ancient civilization known as Doggerland or Fairland that disappeared 5,000 years ago. Thanks to NetGalley for this book. I really wanted to like this book more than I did! I loved the premise and the first couple of chapters, but then I felt it lost its way slightly... There were huge chunks of descriptive prose describing the turbines and their inner workings that I really struggled to follow and visualise, however I realise this could be my failing, but it hindered my enjoyment of the book.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. 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.

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

The wind blows, the branches creak and turn. Somewhere in the metal forest, a tree slumps, groans but does not quite fall. The landscape holds fast, for a moment. For how long? It may be centuries. Barely worth mentioning in the lifetime of water... 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. 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: 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 plot – minimal. I won’t give away what happens but don’t go into this one expecting thrills and spills.He would talk about homes and settlements –a place that had flooded thousands of years ago. He would talk about woods and hills and rivers, and he would trade away crate-loads of turbine parts for maps that showed the seabed as if it were land, surveys from before the farm was built –the paper thin and flaky as rust –that described the density and make-up of the ground beneath the water. Every resupply he would trade for a new chart, or a new trawling tool, and then he would reposition his nets, rewrite his coordinates, and start the whole bloody process again.” 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. But these niggles aside, there is something memorable about Doggerland. It is an unremittingly wet book, damp and cold and rusted, blasted by waves and tempests, but also warm, generous and often genuinely moving. It is a debut of considerable force, emotional weight and technical acumen that weaves its own impressive course. Doggerland is a compelling, finely crafted novel about isolation, selflessness and hope in hopeless circumstances. An impressive debut.

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

This book is possibly a definite contender for the bleakest book I have read in years. Set in the future on a slowly breaking down wind farm maintained as much as possible by the Old Man and the Boy whose names remain a mystery for most of the book. To say that not much is happening would be unfair (there is actually a lot of action here) but everything crumbles in slow motion and there is not much either person can do against it. The comparisons to The Road are spot-on; this future is bleak and narrow in the way th world can be seen by the protagonists. The atmosphere is equally distressing and overwhelming while the language remains a sharp edge that can dazzle the reader. 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? 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…This was an original, moving and complex human story. It centres on a young man (called 'the boy' throughout the narrative) whose job it is to look after and repair the turbines on a wind farm. 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. I can’t better Jon McGregor’s contribution to the publisher’s blurb for this book and take the liberty of reproducing it here. 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.