Time Song: Journeys in Search of a Submerged Land

by Julia Blackburn, Enrique Brinkmann (Illustrator)

Overview

Julia Blackburn has always collected things that hold stories about the past, especially the very distant past: mammoth bones, little shells that happen to be two million years old, a flint shaped as a weapon long ago. Shortly after her husband’s death, Blackburn became fascinated with Doggerland, the stretch of land that once connected Great Britain to Continental Europe but is now subsumed by the North Sea. She was driven to explore the lives of the people who lived there—studying its fossil record, as well as human artifacts that have been unearthed near the area.

In Time Song, Blackburn brings us along on her journey to discover what Doggerland left behind, introducing us to the paleontologists, archaeologists, fishermen and fellow Doggerland enthusiasts she meets along the way. She sees the footprints of early humans fossilized in the soft mud of an estuary alongside the scattered pockmarks made by rain falling eight thousand years ago. She visits a cave where the remnants of a Neanderthal meal have turned to stone. In Denmark she sits beside Tollund Man, who seems to be about to wake from a dream, even though he had lain in a peat bog since the start of the Iron Age. As Doggerland begins to come into focus, what emerges is a profound meditation on time, a sense of infinity as going backward and an intimation of the immensity of everything that has already passed through its time on earth and disappeared.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101871683
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/06/2019
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
File size:	27 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

JULIA BLACKBURN is the author of ten books of nonfiction, including The Three of Us, Old Man Goya (a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist) and With Billie (winner of the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award). She is also the author of the novels The Book of Color and The Leper's Companions, both of which were short-listed for the Orange Prize. She lives in England.

Read an Excerpt

‘Oh,’ I say casually, as if in answer to a question, ‘I’m writing about a country called Doggerland. It’s also known as North Sea Land because that’s where it was, under what is now the North Sea. It emerged after the last Ice Age and with the warming of the climate it became a wonderfully fertile place of rivers and lakes, gently rounded hills and sheltered valleys, reed beds and salt marshes in the lowlands, trees on higher ground and a profusion of life: fish, birds, animals and humans as well. These were a people who left few traces of their passing. They hunted with weapons made from wood, bone or stone; they had canoes cut from the trunks of trees; they had dogs working with them and sometimes buried their dead alongside their dogs. But as the ice went on melting the sea levels rose dramatically – you can’t believe how fast, it could be more than two metres within a century – so the land was inundated, familiar places submerged or made inaccessible. Seven thousand years ago, Doggerbank was still there as an island and then it too was gone.
 
‘And,’ I continue, carried forward by the idea of it all, ‘I am also writing about what happened in this same area long before the last Ice Age. I go back to the first humans who were here, close to where I live: a cache of worked flints was found quite recently near a holiday camp and then a bit further up the coast there is the little flurry of footsteps fossilised in what was once the soft mud of a river estuary. Five people pottering about some nine hundred thousand years ago; they were probably collecting plants and shellfish.
 
‘Mammoth,’ I say, ‘great herds of them moving across the grassy steppes when Britain was part of the Eurasian land mass. I’ve collected quite a lot of mammoth bones, along with those of other extinct creatures; it’s best to go looking after a storm has scoured the edges of the cliffs to reveal whatever secrets they have been hiding, but I often forget to go then. I did pick up a lovely stone axehead just recently. It looks like nothing much until you hold it in your hand and feel how well it fits, how sharp it is.
 
‘Of course I ask myself what on earth I think I’m doing, rattling around like a ghost in such distant landscapes of the past, and this is what might be the answer, or at least part of the answer. I am not especially afraid of my own death, but I am afraid of the death of forests and oceans, the contamination of water and air, the sense that we are heading towards a catastrophe from which there will be no escape. I comfort myself with the knowledge that this is nothing new: the climate has often shifted from extremes of heat to extremes of cold; oceans rising to cover the land and shrinking to reveal it in a different form; living creatures emerging in all their strangeness and determination to survive and some of them manage to hold on, but others do not.
 
‘I wonder now if it makes more sense to imagine infinity going backwards in time, rather than forwards. When you look at it that way round, you no longer have the vague dread of what the future holds, instead there is the intimation of the enormity of everything that has gone before: a solemn procession of life in all its myriad forms moving steadily towards this present moment. You can almost hear the songs they are singing.
 
‘There is something else. My husband died a few years ago. He has vanished and yet he remains close, beneath the surface as it were, so perhaps I am also trying to catch a glimpse of him within the great jumble of everything else that has been lost from our sight.’

Table of Contents

OLD TIME: 1

MIDDLE TIME: 119

NO TIME AT ALL: 205

Acknowledgements: 285

Index: 287

Editorial Reviews

★ 07/01/2019

Award-winning author Blackburn (Old Man Goya) brings her creative energy to the lost prehistoric worlds of northwestern Europe. Doggerland, a region now submerged beneath the North Sea, once connected Britain to continental Europe. Prehistoric humans, mammoths, and other Ice Age denizens once roamed over a landscape that appeared and disappeared over hundreds of thousands of years. In addition to the content, which itself is unique and rarely explored, the book's presentation is extraordinary. There are poems about natural processes and human evolution; seemingly tangential, personal narratives that arrive at an illuminating point; and informational yet highly readable scientific discussions, such as a vivid description of a Netsilik Eskimo hunting party. The text flows like water, almost dreamlike. Brinkmann's stylistic drawings, scattered throughout, resemble cave art. A series of Doggerland maps follows through the work, a chronological presentation illustrating the unrecognizable topography of 18,000 years ago up to the more familiar territory of 7,000 years ago. Those seeking a more straightforward work on the Ice Age may prefer Jamie Woodward's The Ice Age, but Blackburn offers a visionary, memorable account. VERDICT Exploring natural history as part of humanity, this unique, artistic, and original work will be enjoyed by a wide range of readers. [See Prepub Alert, 2/18/19.]—Jeffrey Meyer, Mt. Pleasant P.L., IA

Library Journal

04/01/2019

What people think is lost never entirely leaves, posits novelist and biographer Blackburn (The Emperor’s Lost Island) in this lyrical exploration of Doggerland, the country that until 6,000 years ago connected Britain with mainland Europe and now lies under the North Sea. Alternating chapters of prose with prose-poems she calls “time songs,” Blackburn creates an impressionistic picture of a place that is both gone and yet still there, its landscape partly intact beneath the waves. “Trying to see through the fact of absence is what this book is mostly about,” writes Blackburn, who also reflects on the recent loss of her beloved husband. Along the way, she visits with experts on Doggerland—related to the Danish word dag, meaning “dagger,” which also gave the dogwood its name—and hikes through countryside near her home in England and elsewhere that resembles what Doggerland may have been like: icy in the winter, marshy in the summer. Like one of the scientists she meets on her quest, Blackburn believes life is a process that “does not begin with birth or end with death,” but “is a trajectory in which there is no finite end.” This sweet, sad book will leave its readers meditating on loss and timelessness. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

A magical, mesmerising book that makes you feel giddy at the thought of the deep gulf of history hidden just beneath your feet.” —The Scotsman             
 
“Majestic. . . . Captivating. . . .  Blackburn’s book on the past is above all a response to the urgent problems of the present.” —The Times Literary Supplement

“This is an extraordinary book about time, absence, and perception. . . . Blackburn shows us that, in a time of flux and friction, the gathering of uncertainties can bring greater awareness and a sense of wholeness.” —The Wall Street Journal
 
“Gripping. . . . Unconventional. . . . A meditation on the Mesolithic and what people are truly looking for when they turn to the past.” —The Economist

“Blackburn has a talent for envisioning bygone worlds. . . . The book is less about Doggerland itself than about . . . the tantalizing objects, be they fossils or faxes, that can bridge the living to the dead.” —The New York Times Book Review

From the Publisher

2019-04-28
A search for a lost land reveals secrets of prehistory.

In the early 1990s, archaeologist Bryony Coles began research to find evidence of a submerged land bridge connecting Britain to Europe, a place she named Doggerland, styling it after other lands (England, Jutland) abutting the sea. Coles is one among many individuals—paleontologists, archaeologists, anthropologists, geologists, fishermen, and fossil collectors—who shared their insights with Blackburn (Threads: The Delicate Life of John Craske, 2015, etc.) as she engaged in a quest to discover Doggerland's past. Doggerland, she discovered, had been a solid landmass from 2.6 million years ago until melting ice and rising seas completely flooded it around 7,000 years ago. From a plethora of fossils—one researcher collected 150,000 kilos of bones, including 70,000 mammoth teeth—the author learned that early in its history, the area had been a savannah, where mammoths, woolly rhinos, and mastodon elephants grazed. As the climate became colder, the landscape was transformed into tundra, to which the mammoth, with its shaggy covering of hair, was well adapted to survive. A dramatic temperature rise 11,500 years ago produced marshes, swamps, rivers, and woodlands and an enormous density and diversity of wildlife. Artifacts offer proof that the land was inhabited, as well, by humans: Neanderthals hunted and gathered until they abruptly disappeared, victims of violent and dramatic confrontations." They lived in settlements, able to form "a sedentary society," Coles told Blackburn, "because the food they needed for survival came to them." The author creates a lyrical narrative of her journey: deft portraits of the men and women she interviewed and poetic reflections on her discoveries, her husband's death, and the infinity of the past. Her narrative is more poetic, surely, than her 18 "Time Songs," whose rhythm and language are decidedly proselike. The book is illustrated with maps, and the songs are accompanied by pen-and-ink drawings, some evoking the fanciful style of Paul Klee, by Spanish painter Brinkmann, Blackburn's longtime friend.

A sensitively rendered chronicle of discovery.

Kirkus Reviews