Dreamland: An Evening Standard 'Best New Book' of 2021

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CHARLIE CONNELLY on a superb new novel which creates a horrifyingly plausible near-future for Margate.

Dreamland by Rankin Gee Rosa - AbeBooks Dreamland by Rankin Gee Rosa - AbeBooks

When the government was bad, charity would come our way,” says Chance of her teenage years. “NGOs, non-profits, go-it-aloners. When the government got worse, we’d get less – people needed what they had at home. These were the rhythms we lived by.”

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Margate in particular has seen its fortunes become decidedly mixed in recent decades. By the 1980s the once thriving holiday destination saw its hotels and guesthouses being converted into cheap bedsits, where there was money to be made by landlords trousering government money to house the poor and vulnerable displaced from London and other parts of the south-east by a combination of austerity and the ever-rising cost of living. There’s even a tubthumping fringe politician who “says it like it is” and keeps saying it like it is until he’s manoeuvred himself into power, ready to turn on the people he’d hoodwinked to get him there. In their new home, they find space andwideskies, a world away from the cramped bedsits they’ve lived in up until now. But challenges swiftly mount. JD’s business partner, Kole, has a violent, charismatic energy that whirlpools around him and threatens to draw in the whole family. And when Chance comes across Franky, a girl her age she has never seen before – well-spoken and wearing sunscreen – something catches in the air between them. Their fates are bound: a connection that is immediate, unshakeable, and, in a time when social divides have never cut sharper, dangerous. A love story. A tragedy. A warning. The story of one girl and an entire society. At the same time, terrifying and hopeful. Dreamland takes the familiar and twists it a couple of degrees to show a disturbing and disturbingly credible picture of our possible future. What will happen if we keep ignoring climate change, allow inequalities to widen, allow eugenics to creep into the mainstream and build walls?

Dreamland by Rosa Rankin-Gee By Nina Allan Strange Horizons - Dreamland by Rosa Rankin-Gee By Nina Allan

I genuinely must say that large chunks of this brilliant book are five star but I struggled with other elements a lot!My only issue with this book was the ending point. Rankin-Gee weaves some beautiful writing into a story that is often harsh and aggressive, and although I can understand the open-ended imagination prompting ending, I am so invested in these characters that it’s a little disappointing to not know a little more. However, I still gave Dreamland 5 stars because the rest of the book deserves it, and I can understand why the ending could be like it was. However, if you’d like to tell me what happens with a certain child, Rosa, please do!

Dreamland by Rosa Rankin-Gee | Waterstones

The Australians also face the challenge of climate change and the risk of large-scale population shifts. Marshall explores the fascinating possibility of governments being forced to build new major cities on more hospitable territory. Yes. I suppose that’s why the movie is necessarily a major departure from the book. The movie version is a thriller, with a plot to match. But those characters actually play only bit-parts in the original book. They feel like very separate cultural objects.It’s a contemporary novel, about a gay man and gay woman who fall in love, but it’s also – in a prequel-esque way – within the Dreamland universe. I’m having a lot of fun with it. is touted as the deadline for the world to go carbon neutral and preserve natural habitats. How optimistic are you that we’ll make it? This should be on every 30 books to read before you turn 30 list. Are those a thing? They should be. Dreamland offers a similarly bleak prognosis 100 years on, but while this wonderful novel might be a stark warning of what may be coming down the line for post-Brexit Britain, it also confirms that where humanity endures, its innate goodness will always prevail. How could it be any other way under those incredible Thanet skies?

Dreamland by Rosa Rankin-Gee | Goodreads

This march to an increasingly unjust society rife with social inequality and political extremism is documented through the eyes of Chance, a young girl-then-woman who has been brought to the fading coastal resort of Margate by her once middle class, now junkie mother who has a predilection for choosing the entirely wrong type of men.The premise of the novel is that an agent of the United Nations Postwar Commission is compiling first person accounts—ten years after the event—of what was effectively another pandemic, a zombie pandemic that turned into a worldwide zombie war. The realism is extraordinary; it’s a wild feat of imagination. In all the other books I’ve recommended, you get a first-person narrator, or a defined cast of characters. The world-building in those books is already extremely impressive. But what’s so exceptional about World War Z is that it’s so incredibly diverse. The agent moves around the world, from China to Israel, speaking to characters of different countries from different social positions. Its geopolitics feels very accurate, and he imagines them with such complexity and density. It’s staggeringly well done. It is in many respects a bleak and sobering tale as Rankin-Gee explores the possible end point of government policies which reward the rich and punish the poor, the seemingly endless march of climate change as it lays waste to our planetary home, and the way in which many communities outside of major urban centres such as London (the novel is UK-set) are being used as dumping grounds for the poor and dispossessed.