Doggerland

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In today’s aggressively networked world, the monotony and lack of entertainment depicted in ‘Doggerland’ seem utterly extraordinary. The boy” and his belligerent colleague “the old man” endure near-terminal boredom, dreadful food and the latter’s questionable homebrew in their Sisyphean task of maintaining a facility that is clearly beyond their means to repair.

We’ve got a number of books that hit our shelves before we shut our doors, and perhaps didn’t get the love they deserved, so we’re shining a light on these fantastic new(ish) titles now. The combination of imagination, linguistic precision and the theme of harsh struggle in an unforgiving environment makes it a little reminiscent of Cynan Jones, but the whole thing is rather impressive.Salt water rusts all the metal it comes into contact with, meaning a losing battle to keep the facility in any kind of repair. 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. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

By contrast with the omnipresent plastic the non-human world makes only a brief fleeting appearance as a front of fish course through the farm, though none ever appear on the end of the boy’s fishing line. It is clear that author Ben Smith set out to create a circular narrative – with the idea that, despite change, things will always revert to the way they were in time – and he has been successful in this aim. Scientists believe Doggerland flooded between 6000-8000 years ago when rising temperatures caused a mass-melting of ice and glaciers.But less clear is exactly who this contract is with, an organisation referred to only as “the Company. The batteries on his boat are now dead, but a lovely sequence unfolds when he discovers the more beautiful technology of sail power – a concept lost to his electric generation.

Can it be that this young man really remembers so little of his past and has so little curiosity about the wider world? This strange, new world is made stranger still by the purposely constrained stage against which the narrative plays out. The pilot – in the role of not-quite-stranger coming to town – provides a narrative impetus with a revelation that spikes Jem’s interest in what happened to his father. Doggerland neither charts our path into the outrun of the climate crisis, nor offers a route to collectively avoid it. The Mesolithic hunter-gatherers lived in a rich, but constantly changing world – to which they successfully adapted.

The location is vague and claustrophobic, the pace is usually slow, and there are repetitive scenes and few conversations. Doggerland, the debut novel by Plymouth University creative writing lecturer Ben Smith, is set in a drowned landscape and has just two main characters: ‘the old man’ and ‘the boy’ (who’s not really a boy anymore), who navigate an enormous North Sea wind farm via boat.