Doggerland

Product Information

As part of a long-term project to map Doggerland, Gaffney’s team took sediment cores from the seabed off the coast of East Anglia, in the east of England. The cores contain traces of the Storegga tsunami, such as broken shells. It seems the tsunami slammed up a river valley, ripping trees from the sides – and leaving their DNA in the sediments for the team to find. But the water soon retreated and later sediments suggest the area was above water again. Doggerland is brilliantly inventive, beautifully-crafted and superbly gripping debut novel about loneliness and hope, nature and survival—set on an off-shore windfarm in the not-so-distant future. The wind blows, the branches creak and turn. Somewhere in the metal forest, a tree slumps, groans but does not quite fall. The landscape holds fast, for a moment. For how long? It may be centuries. Barely worth mentioning in the lifetime of water... 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. Their days are mundane: travelling around the farm in their rechargeable boat, carrying out repairs for 'The Company', keeping the blades turning, eating bland manufactured food, playing pool, dredging the seabed for useless items. All there is, apart from the water, is their clipped conversation and the quarterly visit from a supply boat.

Mesolithic people populated Doggerland. Archaeologists and anthropologists say the Doggerlanders were hunter-gatherers who migrated with the seasons, fishing, hunting, and gathering food such as hazelnuts and berries. By 8200 years ago (8200 calibrated years before the present), Doggerland existed as a small archipelago, which had drowned by 7000 years agoAs the news spreads across the island, Karen endeavours to investigate the crime, while maintaining her dignity, and, as she delves into Susanne’s life, she begins to realise that the answer to the murder may lie in the secrets of the past. The novel has a very distinctive setting and premise: a boy and an old man fixing turbines at a wind farm in the North Sea, living in very cruel conditions on a rig. They’re isolated from the rest of the world besides a pilot who brings them food and equipment every now and then. Some references to the “Company” and Chinese. While the world beyond these rows of turbines remains a mystery, the historical “Doggerland” in the title of the novel, combined with the modern wind farm setting, signals a dystopian vision of the Anthropocene. Thank you Wikipedia: Around 10000 years ago, as Europe was coming out of the last ice age, ancient hunter-gatherers of the Mesolithic period inhabited Doggerland. The rich habitats of marshlands, valleys, rivers, and lakes drew groups from all over, looking for fish, birds, and a freshwater supply. Archaeologists predict Doggerland spanned from Britain’s East coast to the Netherlands – about a quarter the size of Europe itself.

The old man is a victim of his lonely trade. The boy is becoming one, although he has a quest, to find out what happened to his father. The Company forced the boy to take on his father’s contract when he disappeared.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. Jem elects to fulfil his father’s intentions and leave the windfarm for the unknown freedom of the coast, but he becomes caught in a terrifying storm that drives his vessel far through the turbine range. The storm is realised with all the skill of Joseph Conrad or Richard Hughes. Jem is marooned for months on a vast turbine that is equipped, bizarrely, with a functioning coffee vending machine. 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. 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: 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). It is a hard life of boredom and constraint, a job unremitting in its demands, but beneath it there is a seam of intrigue. Some years before, the boy’s father disappeared while working on the same rig. It’s clear that the old man knows more than he is letting on, but it is some loaded comments by the pilot that prompt the boy to investigate what really happened.

Doggerland isn’t a setting conjured up by the author, but an area of land that once connected Great Britain to continental Europe. It is now submerged beneath North Sea after being flooded by rising sea levels around 6,500–6,200 BCE but was hitherto a rich habitat colonised by humans during the Mesolithic period. Something similar appears to be taking place on the mainland, though the protagonists haven’t returned home or seen the coastline since taking up their positions and know next to nothing about events in the wider world. The title Doggerland prompts more questions than it answers. I was aware of the area of dry land that used to connect Britain to Europe before it was flooded when the ice retreated and that now lies under the North Sea. I was aware that prehistoric artefacts have long been discovered off the British and Dutch coasts, and reading this story led to me spending a happy hour looking into it all online. I loved the way the author amalgamates these and other hints of ancient events into a futuristic novel about a world undergoing a slow but relentless apocalypse, and maybe renewal - really fascinating and thought-provoking. While Smith provides glimpses of what has happened to the world at large – a corporation, rather hokily called “the Corporation”, appears to be in charge of everything – it never quite coalesces into a coherent, persuasive whole. It’s fine for the boy not to know what’s really going on, but Smith never quite convinces that he knows himself. There are also interludes throughout the book that provide a history of Doggerland that add little to the narrative and sail close to self-indulgence. For The Old Man it is the distant past – he dredges the sea to extract prehistoric artefacts from the eponymous land mass long ago submerged under the North Sea ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland) The boy has been sent by the Company to take his place, but the question of where he went and why is one for which the Old Man will give no answer.

Publication Order of Doggerland Books

Maria Adolfsson’s novel “Cruel Tides” is a brilliant addition to the “Doggerland” series of novels. In this work, Karen Eiken Hornby is dealing with an impossible choice, a missing woman, and a secluded island.