Doggerland

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The boy is there because his father deserted his post and he has been sent to fulfill the contract. The old man has resigned himself to this repetitive, pointless life. Until the boy plans their escape...

Even though Maria started out as a communications director, the success of her novels made it possible for her to leave her full-time job and become a communications director. For her works, she won the Petrona Award which is one of the highest literary fiction awards in Sweden. 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? The context – sometime in the future sea levels have risen. Vague suggestions of the wider world now controlled by ‘the Company’ and an occasional word in Mandarin are the few hints provided. The Boy, who is no longer really a boy, and the Old Man, whose age is unguessable, are charged with its maintenance. They carry out their never-ending work as the waves roll, dragging strange shoals of flotsam through the turbine fields. Land is only a memory.It’s more than 8,000 years since the North Sea swept over Doggerland, the land bridge that connected Britain to the continent until the end of the last ice age. But in this age of climate change and Brexit, the setting for Ben Smith’s dystopian debut could hardly be more timely; just this week, scientists set off on a voyage to map what remains of the lost land mass, with the hopes of finding evidence of stone age settlements. But Smith’s novel, simply titled Doggerland, finds an old man and a boy in a bleak near-future world, trapped on a decaying wind farm in the middle of the North Sea: Writing a novel is different. It’s a much slower process. It’s not about changing things as they are now, it’s thinking about how things could be in the future so that it can help people make longer-term decisions. But if you want to make drastic changes, spending four years on your own writing a novel is probably going to be a bit too late.” I must be honest: I was not sure about these. Some readers may appreciate their concision, and the change of pace they represent, but they seemed to me to be at once both plodding and a bit fey. I could have done without them.

Things aren’t always what they seem on the surface. Looking at the area between mainland Europe and the eastern coast of Great Britain, you probably wouldn’t guess it had been anything other than a great expanse of ocean water. But roughly 12,000 years ago, as the last major ice age was reaching its end, the area was very different. Instead of the North Sea, the area was a series of gently sloping hills, marshland, heavily wooded valleys, and swampy lagoons: Doggerland.

Dr. Sasja van der Vaart-Verschoof

This book shares with “The Road” the sparseness and bleakness of the prose, with the brutality and futility of much of what has happened and the world that has resulted from it, just occasionally offset by glimpses of empathy and sympathy between the characters and a tenuous sense of hope. She would then follow it up with two more works in the series. While initially published in Swedish, the works became so popular that they would eventually be translated into 18 more languages. The works have also sold more than 200 million copies in Sweden and millions more in greater Europe and North America. The Atlantis of northern Europe sank under the seas slowly, rather than being obliterated by a tsunami. A little over 8000 years ago, a devastating tsunami swept across the North Sea, striking a small island that existed there at the time. But new evidence suggests the wave didn’t permanently swamp Dogger Island and its surrounding archipelago. People may have lived on the remaining land for centuries afterwards. 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. 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.