Ben Smith’s powerful debut novel takes us offshore into a polluted future and to a singular seascape – a vast wind farm of more than 6,000 turbines somewhere out on Dogger Bank. Jem, who is presumably in his mid-teens, and “old man” Greil, who is clearly unwell and weakening, live in serfdom aboard an abandoned, dilapidated accommodation rig; they use an electric boat to maintain the decaying wind turbines that extend for up to 80 miles around them. It is a losing battle against limited tools, bad weather and ill health. These custodians of rust are visited at unpredictable intervals from the coast by the menacing Pilot, who moves freely on a small supply vessel, delivering vital but unappetising tinned food. The Pilot resembles a jailer who also barters for extras.
Jem is a skilled and resourceful young mechanic, in the tradition of his own father, who disappeared from the same windfarm when Jem was young. Greil knows the facts about the father’s disappearance but has become apathetic, spending days trawling the shallow seabed for plastic debris and ancient artefacts of submerged Doggerland, the Neolithic land bridge which connected the east of England to the European continent thousands of years ago.
Jem and Greil’s attachment to the ruined wind farm is reluctant, but time seems to have blurred their vocations into an attitude of unquestioning survivalism; an unseen authority incarcerates them offshore, and like weary Robinson Crusoes stuck on a prison moon, they might as well get on with it. All of this adds up to a wonderfully tactile, vivid environment. The vast blades of the turbines flail, feather and align themselves to the prevailing winds – some so leviathan that their interiors are “like staring up a mineshaft that had been cut out of the sky”.
Doggerland is an example of how intense and deeply focused the novel can be when examining a closed universe. It posits sinister mysteries that it never explains, giving a vertiginous hint that the mainland no longer exists in any recognisable form – that there is no longer anybody at the controls of the world. Most Kafkaesque of all, it prompts the question of what this slowly failing electricity source is actually supplying. The sense is – nothing.
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.
This is an emotionally compelling book, but not flawless. Occasionally the writing resorts to basic fare: “The boy stumbled and fell … He staggered to the controls and cut the throttle.” The structure includes short inter-chapters that describe the geological evolution and inundation of Doggerland, but these add little to the narrative and clarify less. The Pilot on his supply boat exists as a plot necessity so that our two main characters don’t starve to death, but it is never explained why they don’t try to take advantage of this singular lifeline.
Speculative fiction strongly displays the immediate paranoias and dreads of the time in which it is written; the population explosion fears examined in the work of Harry Harrison or John Brunner during the 1960s are not such modish subjects any more. Electric engines, the replacement of fresh food by protein substitutes, seas so polluted that minute plastic fragments are permanently infused into all seawater – these are today’s hot topics. Yet embedded deep within Doggerland we also sense a cry of protest against our violated landscape and a celebration of the mysteries of its ancient formation. The novel belongs in a literary tradition of reflection on and solidarity with English nature, reaching back through Robert Macfarlane to Edward Thomas, Richard Jefferies and John Clare. It is a haunting story and could break the prejudice against speculative fiction often reflected in prize lists.
• Alan Warner’s next novel, Kitchenly 434, will be published by Faber in 2020. Doggerland is published by 4th Estate (£12.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
