Doggerland

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It was unfortunate that his father had chosen to renege on his contract…as the only next of kin this duty fell to him. Early on in the book, we are told that of course, the boy was not really a boy, any more than the old man was all that old; but the names are relative, and out of the grey, some kind of distinction was necessary. 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. The scene in which the young man finds a pristine conference room at the top of a 150 ft turbine particularly stands out in this respect. Overall, though, I found 'Doggerland' a rather frustrating fable as I couldn’t identify what, if anything, was being allegorised.

We’re a collaborative review site run by volunteers who love Fantasy, Sci-fi, Horror, and everything in-between. To an extent, this comes with the territory: Smith has chosen this circumscribed locale and this minuscule circle of characters, so it’s not surprising that the plot and prose come across as similarly limited. We work closely with publishers and authors to ensure that we offer the best books on the market for your child. Nikoleris et all expressed a hopeful conclusion that “Through identification with the protagonists in literary fiction, climate change moves from being distant and abstract to close and personal…and [can] create space for personal reflections. Furthermore, when the Old Man uses a system of rods and T-bar to draw core samples from the seabed, what comes up is not simply soil.Blink and you’ll miss it, but the two main characters do actually have names: the old man is Greil, and the boy is Jem. The Pilot on his supply boat exists as a plot necessity so that our two main characters don’t starve to death, but it is never explained why they don’t try to take advantage of this singular lifeline. It posits sinister mysteries that it never explains, giving a vertiginous hint that the mainland no longer exists in any recognisable form – that there is no longer anybody at the controls of the world. 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.

In tone Doggerland resembles John Lanchester’s bleak novel, The Wall (2019) in which a near future Britain is protected from rising sea levels and the concomitant refugees by an encircling wall which must be patrolled by conscripts while an unelected elite lord it over them. What exactly happened remains unclear but, together with the Boy, we glean some disturbing details along the way – in this regard, Smith takes a page out of dystopian post-apocalyptic fiction, and suggests that society has been taken over by some sort of totalitarian regime of whom the Boy’s father was, presumably, a victim. Doggerland is a superbly gripping debut novel about loneliness and hope, nature and survival – set on an off-shore windfarm in the not-so-distant future.Jeff Noon and Steve Beard combine their powers to tell the story of an otherworldly London and its waterways in Gogmagog. Jem, who is presumably in his mid-teens, and “old man” Greil, who is clearly unwell and weakening, live in serfdom aboard an abandoned, dilapidated accommodation rig; they use an electric boat to maintain the decaying wind turbines that extend for up to 80 miles around them. The Boy and the Old Man, like latter day lighthouse keepers, jostle along with a well described mix of companionship and antipathy. A strange, haunting and poetic tale perhaps set thousands of years in the future where most of the planet seems to be covered by sea.

The legal obligation that binds Jem to fil his father’s place is not only indentured service, but a hereditary one akin to slavery without any mention of pay, or shore leave. This beautifully crafted novel about loneliness and hope, nature and survival, is as haunting as it is compelling – a very special debut indeed. However, Admussen in Six Proposals for the reform of Literature in the Era of Climate Change (2016) admonished that authors should “ retire the portrait of the single soul.

More poetic interstices describe the glacial melt that flooded Doggerland over the course of millennia, cutting Britain off from continental Europe. Although Jem inhabits a sprawling rusting farm of wind turbines some 80 miles in radius in the middle of the North Sea, there is a claustrophobic feel to the setting, with its barren uniformity and a cast tiny – almost Beckett-like – in number. However, climate change fiction, like climate science itself, can address the problem of the climate crisis on many fronts and in a variety of ways. The narrative takes on a captivating momentum when Jem discovers, tethered to a distant turbine, his father’s old maintenance boat, which he was priming for escape. As the plot is teased out, the boy makes discoveries that could shake the rig to its foundations, resulting in plenty of moments of tension as he tries to conduct his investigations covertly.

Whilst the reader is made to share the ennui of the Boy and his mentor, Smith turns his story into a gripping one by making the most of the scant plot elements. It was a grassland roamed by mammoth, lion, red deer – and their human hunters – but melting ice turned it into an area of marshes and wetlands before it was finally and definitively claimed by the waves around 8,000 years ago.Players command small forces of infantry, cavalry, artillery, and other… stranger… troops on the Doggerland Front. Jem is a skilled and resourceful young mechanic, in the tradition of his own father, who disappeared from the same windfarm when Jem was young. The struggle to keep the turbines working with limited resources becomes an image of the losing battle against the rising oceans, at once awesome and terrible in their vastness. The work, in fact, portrays an unspecified but seemingly not-so-distant future, where global warming and rising sea levels (possibly exacerbated by some other cataclysm) have eroded the coastline and brought to an end civilisation as we know it. They carry out their never-ending work, scoured by wind and salt, as the waves roll, dragging strange shoals of flotsam through the turbine fields.