It’s hard to write about Rosa Rankin-Gee’s apocalyptic Dreamland without channelling aquatic metaphors. Water courses through its pages, as rising sea levels heighten inequalities, buoy populist politicians and wash away every certainty of civilisation. But there’s also the novel’s prose – its liquid grace and glinting sparkle – and the sheer irresistibility of a narrative that sweeps along with a force that feels tidal in its pull.
The setting is Margate, sometime in the all too near future. “Shoreditch-on-Sea”, as it once was known, has gone from offering “charity shops, chip shops, shut shops” to food banks and “kem”, a drug on which the locals are hooked. Narrator Chance arrived as a small child, funded by the government to leave an overcrowded London along with her protective big brother, JD, and Jas, their young mother, an art school dropout whose brightness is dimmed by addiction. Eventually, JD’s pumped-up, volatile business partner, Kole, joins their band and later a baby boy named Blue arrives.
All along, the tide is rising. A climate event known as “the washout” leaves untold dead, there are “pyro-heatwaves” and scorching winters. The political climate is equally menacing: the capital cuts impoverished regions adrift and as the nation fragments, walls go up – literally. When a demagogue nicknamed “Action Man” promises fresh starts elsewhere to anyone left in Margate, Chance is torn. Her best friend, Davey, is all for staying put, but what of flaxen-haired Francesca, the do-gooding Londoner she’s fallen for?
Dreamland unfolds with the benefit of hard-won hindsight, casting an elegiac veil of inevitability over events while quickening our curiosity – and dread – about just where Chance might have ended up. She’s a magnetic heroine; brave, slightly broken, devoted to little Blue. She’s also acutely observant. “It was the smallest things that made me feel the most,” she says at one point and Rankin-Gee makes this true for the reader, too, whether she’s clocking the nervousness of JD’s laughter around Kole (“like his lungs were clapping”) or the precise shade of a greying tooth dulling Jas’s smile (“tea gone cold”).
Though it could certainly be classified as “cli-fi”, Dreamland is also a love story – two – and an account of survival, defiance even, in the face of male violence. When things become grim – and they really do – there is room for macabre humour as well as the tiniest flicker of hope. Rankin-Gee is far too strong a writer for her priority to be anything but the story and yet it’s one with a hyper-alert social conscience. It’s apt, then, that after scenes of seat-edge tension and heartbreaking devastation, what Chance learns should be this: that sometimes, the thing that saves you is having someone else to look after.
• Dreamland by Rosa Rankin-Gee is published by Scribner (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
• This article was amended on 5 April to correct a misspelling of the author’s name
