Sunken Lands: A Journey Through Flooded Kingdoms and Lost Worlds
Gareth E. Rees (Elliott & Thompson, £16.99)
ON a planet where about 71% of the surface is water and the levels are only rising, it’s unsurprising so much of our history is submerged. Gareth E. Rees dives into those lost worlds, charting thousands of flood myths, from New Orleans in the US to Naples in Italy. Together, these are the narratives that make us all ‘children of the flood’, descended from those who witnessed ‘their lands drowned, civilisations crumble and populations scatter’.
Given the stark warnings contained within, it is admirable that this book is such a joy to read. Its opening precis of fluctuating seas mixes scientific poise with the relish of storytelling, stemming from the author’s childhood obsession with Edgar Rice Burroughs and Jules Verne. Likewise, his early years near Ladybower Reservoir in Derbyshire, a young adulthood in the marshy Lea Valley east of London and the author’s present history on the south coast with his daughters and their cocker spaniel Hendrix help inform a tale that is as personal as it is passionate.
Although judicious about ‘draining the landscape of its stories’, he knits an enticing network of sluices and streams. Each chapter serves the other, offering vivid links between worlds— surely, this is the only book in which the English Wash and the Venetian Lagoon are seen in tandem. An archive-bound search for Atlantis is somewhat effortful, but Mr Rees plunges with much greater ease into a ‘ghost world of the collective cultural memory’ along Cardigan Bay, Wales, and the ‘feather-littered’ jetties of the Louisiana wetlands in America.
A musician as well as an author, Mr Rees always writes with imagination and lightly worn songfulness. He ponders what the ancient dwellers of Doggerland, connecting Britain to Continental Europe, ‘might think if they were reanimated, suddenly, only to see mackerel, jellyfish and P&O ferries soaring above their village’, before visualising ‘the stone faces of forgotten deities [peering] at passing sharks’ in the Neolithic villages in the Bay of Atlit off Israel. Sunken Lands is filled with such compelling images.
Literary, lyrical, it is also an unapologetic product of the pandemic, recalling a time when we were able to pause and reconnect with our environment. Covid tropes may have reached their end, but Mr Rees’s writing makes you hope that link will not be lost. Certainly, in a future where biblical deluges are more than likely, this beautiful ‘lament for a sunken city, and a warning for those yet to sink’ will prove invaluable.