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Doggerland

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In the North Sea, far from what remains of the coastline, a wind farm stretches for thousands of acres. A scientific exploration of the advanced ancient civilization known as Doggerland or Fairland that disappeared 5,000 years ago.

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

The cast – two grizzled and taciturn maintenance men, one older (“the old man”) and one not so old (“the boy”, though he’s not actually a boy). 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.”

Table of Contents

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 plot development is deliberately very limited – The Boy finding a little more about his Father and having to decide whether he follows his desire to escape to the open seas. Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13 was set in a Peak District village, and measured the how the quotidian dramas of a large cast of villagers played out against the rhythmic seasons of village life and the natural world, while time continues to pass incessantly.

Doggerland by Ben Smith | Goodreads Doggerland by Ben Smith | Goodreads

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. 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. 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… Graham Phillips has made a powerful case for advanced prediluvian “Phillips’s thorough investigations of this fascinating topic reveal not only a prehistoric lost world that is today rewriting history but also the genesis point of the stone circle culture whose greatest achievement was Stonehenge. An important addition to the bookshelf of anyone into the mysteries of the megaliths.”A lot of the writing is poetic in nature. Smith imports a few words from other languages (I think that’s where they come from!) and is not, it seems, averse to making up some new words. “Gurrelly” may or may not be a typo, but whatever it is, it should stay in the book as it is a magnificent word! In the first few chapters, I kept highlighting passages and making a note that said “cinematic”: Smith’s writing draws vivid images in your mind and it is hard not to see some passages as clips from a movie. For example, try to read this without imagining a camera pulling away from the boy to expose the vastness of the sea around him: 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. 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. For The Boy it is a search for his father – previously The Old Man’s partner, and whose place he is required to take

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