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…

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

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. 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.

Table of Contents

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.

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The prose – unadorned, almost flat, often technical. Quite a lot about turbines and nacelles, gunwales and gantries. More poetic interstices describe the glacial melt that flooded Doggerland over the course of millennia, cutting Britain off from continental Europe. The flooded world Smith creates is wholly, bleakly persuasive. The prose is simple, at least on the surface, but the cadence of the sentences, their honed style, is perfectly matched to its barren, sinister setting. Smith writes boredom and unease brilliantly, but also has the steel to write action sequences with verve and precision. New marine archaeological evidence has revealed the remains of a large land mass to the north of Britain that hosted an advanced civilization 1,000 years before the recognized “first” civilizations of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, or India. Remembered in Celtic legends as Tu-lay, and referred to by geologists as Doggerland or Fairland, this civilization began at least as early as 4000 BC but was ultimately destroyed by rising sea levels, huge tsunamis, and a terrible viral epidemic released from melting permafrost during a cataclysmic period of global warming. 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 Boy’s father once worked on the farm but disappeared in puzzling circumstances. Consequently, the son was sent by the Company to fulfil his contract, but where he went remains a mystery and the Old Man is loath to discuss the matter. 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.