I was going to go to [Mesolithic site] Star Carr and then I decided not to because I was told there is no longer anything there to see, although I suppose I could have gone anyway since trying to see through the fact of absence is what this book is mostly about. [loc. 1821]
A marvellous, engaging, idiosyncratic book about finding traces of Doggerland -- the region that joined southern Britain to Europe, until it flooded around 6500BC. Fishing boats have been bringing up mammoth bones, prehistoric tools and Neanderthal remains since the nineteenth century, and in the 1990s Bryony Coles produced speculative maps of the area.
Julia Blackburn is, like me, a person who likes to pick up old things -- fossils, stones, bones -- and think about them. Her approach to Doggerland is as much poetic as scientific. Her speculations are rooted in solid evidence, and in conversations with those who are familiar, professionally or personally, with some aspect of Doggerland. (An archaeologist, studying 'past disaster science', tells her it's very likely that there will be a catastrophic, climate-altering volcanic eruption in Europe: 'such disasters are the natural consequences of lifting the weight of ice from the land' [loc. 1501]. A fossil hunter gifts her a mammoth bone. An artist friend, Enrique Brinkmann, provides illustrations.)
The high points of this book, for me, were the moments where the past came alive for the author in a way that could be shared. Next to some small, blurry human footprints she sees "... the constellation of little pockmarks imprinted on the flesh-like softness of the clay and made by the rain that was falling on one particular day between 5500 and 5200 BC. As I look I can hear the pattering sound and I can feel the wetness of it soaking into my hair and skin. The crane has flown away, the children have gone, but the rain goes on falling." [loc. 2567]. Such moments recur throughout Time Song, sometimes in the 'songs' or poems that divide the book, sometimes in the author's descriptions of exploration, sometimes in the memories that are triggered by thinking about the past. (She's mourning her husband, and in a way searching for his absence as well as the vanished land beneath the sea.)
A beautiful book: sadly, it did not work well on Kindle. The illustrations were unclear, the maps were fuzzy, and worst of all the publishers lazily included the index from the print edition: "The page references in this index correspond to the printed edition from which this ebook was created. To find a specific word or phrase from the index, please use the search feature of your ebook reader." Regenerating an index is not difficult. Nor is returning a Kindle book in favour of eventually acquiring a paper version.
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