Doggerland

Product Information

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. Ben Smith has created a vision of the future in which the world ends with neither a bang nor a whimper but just rusts gradually into the sea. I found it both terrifying and hugely enjoyable, as well as tremendously moving. Ben Smith's writing is incredibly precise; working with a restricted palette of steel greys and flaking blues, he paints the boundaried seascape with vivid detail. This is a story about men and fathers, the faint consolation of routine, and the undying hope of finding out what lies beyond the horizon. I absolutely loved it' - Jon McGregor As such, when she wakes up next to Jounas Smeed her boss in a strange hotel room, she knows that she has committed a terrible mistake. However, things will get worse when the man’s wife is discovered brutally killed. For Smeed, the only person that can provide a good alibi can only be Karen. Doggerland is the vast, fertile area that once connected the east coast of England to mainland Europe – until, in around 5000BC, it disappeared beneath a rising sea. How do we know of its existence? Was it really there, or did someone just dream it up? The strange and interesting thing is that, in a sense, it is a new place as well as an old one. Only at the beginning of the 20th century did people start to be aware of it, when new deep sea trawling nets began to drag up not only the bones of mammoths, but also those of animals from the Holocene period, which started 11,500 years ago; and not until the 1990s did it finally receive its name, when the archaeologist Professor Bryony Cole decided to call it Doggerland. 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.

For The Boy it is a search for his father – previously The Old Man’s partner, and whose place he is required to take The first discoveries suggesting the existence of a previously inhabited land under the sea were made in the 1900s by those most familiar with the waters – fisherman. Fishing trawlers, dragging nets along the seafloor, brought more than fish to the surface. They found animal tusks, Mesolithic and Neolithic tools, and fragments of human bones throughout the century. They were first ignored or attributed to coincidence until peat and fossilized forests were discovered beneath the seafloor. Archaeologists, certain these findings were evidence of a human settlement below the North Sea, began to investigate the area. They named the area Doggerland after Dogger Bank, a large sandbank in the North Sea. 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. We are great fans of a good island-set crime-fiction novel. Scandinavian writer Maria Adolfsson’s Fatal Isles, translated into English by Agnes Broome, is set on the fictional Doggerland, a cluster of islands which lie between Denmark and the UK, and a melting pot of cultures.Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13 was set in a Peak District village, and measured the how the quotidian dramas of a large cast of villagers played out against the rhythmic seasons of village life and the natural world, while time continues to pass incessantly.

Sanity and resolve patiently weather the bleak and hostile location of a decaying oceanic platform, until monotony casts off and drifts beyond its dependable boundary. 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.What a wonderful novel. An old man and a boy live their lives on a rig in the north sea, repairing turbines on a giant wind farm. An ecological event has seen the world ripped of its resources, only plastic and electricity seem in rich health. 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.