BOOKS, RADIO AND TV
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BOOK TIME SONG BY JULIA BLACKBURN, JONATHAN CAPE, £20 (HB)
On the surface, Time Song is about the creation, habitation and submerging of Doggerland, a fertile area of land connecting Britain to continental Europe until around 5000 BC. But on a deeper level, it is an extraordinary work about the past and its remnants, about loss and discovery, about the fluidity of time and space. Blackburn asks, “can a man dream of a country he has never seen?”, and this book is her attempt to do just that.
Her prose is interspersed with poems – the ‘Time Songs’ of the title – and artwork, in which she imagines past landscapes, peoples and animals now vanished under the sea. Blackburn’s deceased husband, the sculptor Herman Makkink, is a presence throughout the book, but he does not haunt it. Rather, the author is “trying to catch a glimpse of him within the great jumble of everything else that has been lost from our sight”, a task that sets her on the path of hunting mammoth bones on coastlines, visiting ancient peat-bog bodies in Denmark and conjuring the former inhabitants of Doggerland through their sparse remains.
This is also the story of Blackburn’s own past, a life spent with one foot in the Netherlands and the other in England, like a modern-day embodiment of Doggerland. As she traces coastlines and waters, her story intersects with a cast of other seekers-of-the-past: Dutch fishermen, archaeologists and palaeontologists. Blackburn’s poignant writing is the ideal medium through which to explore the porous boundaries between land and sea, past and present, life and death. But be warned: the final ‘Time Song’ is hard to get through dry-eyed. Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough, historian and BBC presenter