Dreamland: An Evening Standard 'Best New Book' of 2021

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Dreamland: An Evening Standard 'Best New Book' of 2021

Dreamland: An Evening Standard 'Best New Book' of 2021

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From there it's a downward spiral,drugs,men,drink... and that's before the massive climate change and collapse of government. Best friends Agnes and Bea have just finished secretarial college and, longing for excitement, they tell their parents they’re going travelling round Europe but move into a chaotic house-share in Hampstead and try to lose their virginity. Duels to the death, weekly, in the garden. Adjudicated by my father, of course, who we both try to bribe. No – not competitive at all, just interested in similar things, though done differently I think. She’s definitely the OG speculative writer – her exceptional novel The Ice People, set in a close-future Britain where climate change has sparked a new ice age, came out in 1998 – and she moved to Thanet before I did. Come to think of it, I better get my defence lawyers ready. Manston Airport, which among other routes hosted a twice-daily KLM service to Amsterdam before decline set in, was bought for a pound in 2013 amid encouraging noises about investment and expansion before closing down, at the cost of 144 jobs. Most recently Manston has been an overflow lorry park mitigating Brexit-related delays at the Port of Dover. Books featuring dystopian or post-apocalyptic themes offer us an opportunity to study human nature outside of the normal structure of society, says Rosa Rankin-Gee, author of the acclaimed novel Dreamland. Here, she recommends five other books featuring a near-future dystopia, all of which explore a societal or cultural unraveling through beautiful prose.

Dreamland by Rosa Rankin-Gee Book review: Dreamland by Rosa Rankin-Gee

This is a dystopian novel based on the rising sea levels and overpopulation with families being offered cash to leave their homes and move to the coasts, despite this being a death wish.

Yes. I suppose that’s why the movie is necessarily a major departure from the book. The movie version is a thriller, with a plot to match. But those characters actually play only bit-parts in the original book. They feel like very separate cultural objects.

Dreamland by Rosa Rankin-Gee - Signed Edition - Coles Books Dreamland by Rosa Rankin-Gee - Signed Edition - Coles Books

The Australians also face the challenge of climate change and the risk of large-scale population shifts. Marshall explores the fascinating possibility of governments being forced to build new major cities on more hospitable territory. Your mum, Maggie Gee, has written on similar themes, most recently in The Red Children . Is there any kind of rivalry between the two of you about who gets to tell speculative stories set on the Kent coast?Rosa Rankin-Gee’s novel is very much about this – about poor families given “grants” to move out of London in a not-too-distant future where the temperature and sea levels have ri Even so, for all this bleakness, and the ominous presence of Chance’s mother’s abusive younger boyfriend Kole, Chance somehow keeps keeping on, driven largely by a need to love and protect Blue, but also by some innate sense that life, damaged and broken as it is, is worth fighting for. It is in many respects a bleak and sobering tale as Rankin-Gee explores the possible end point of government policies which reward the rich and punish the poor, the seemingly endless march of climate change as it lays waste to our planetary home, and the way in which many communities outside of major urban centres such as London (the novel is UK-set) are being used as dumping grounds for the poor and dispossessed.

Dreamland by Rosa Rankin-Gee | Goodreads Dreamland by Rosa Rankin-Gee | Goodreads

Theirs is a world lives in tatty hostels and violent neighbourhoods, where school is sometimes open, sometimes not, where social programs start and stop with alarming regularity and where a hard scrabble is the default not the exeception. Also: whether young or old, we’re living at a time where the world is often stranger than fiction. A lot of what’s happening to us— climate change, the spectre of war, a pandemic—are worked out or grappled with through these novels. I think we can see in them a future that we don’t want to happen. They can also be quite stoic. When you think through what you might do in those circumstances, it affords you—or at least you hope it does—some level of preparedness. In Chance, the novel’s protagonist, Rankin-Gee has created one of those characters that stays with the reader long after finishing the book. Part Little Nell from The Old Curiosity Shop, part Turtle from Gabriel Tallent’s My Absolute Darling, Chance is named with irony as hers is a life all-but devoid of opportunity. According to your research, how far into the future is the Kent coast predicted to be flooded to the extent depicted in Dreamland ? This combination of circumstances built over time to turn Thanet into somewhere ripe for exploitation by populist dog-whistlers. The region became fertile ground for UKIP to the extent that in 2014 an in-depth analysis of the area’s issues in the London Review of Books was titled “In Farageland”.In Chance’s day-to-day life, the hope she clings to may not have the power to move mountains necessarily – if it did, she would have long ago used it to alter her life beyond all current recognition – but it does have the power, most of the time at least to sustain Chance through a life full of abuse, deprivation, loss, death, economic collapse and manipulative cruelty. When the government was bad, charity would come our way,” says Chance of her teenage years. “NGOs, non-profits, go-it-aloners. When the government got worse, we’d get less – people needed what they had at home. These were the rhythms we lived by.” When her emotionally distant husband refuses point blank, Florence sets off on a solo road trip instead. I don’t know. There are so many scenes, and most of them seem frozen now. My mum too — I’d freeze her right then if I could. After we got the news about her parents, she decided, she told us, to relax a little. Which meant go out more. There were nights when she came home with blood on her top, or no shoes on — with Liam, without him — but she was still just about on the edge of being okay then. Somtimes things happened almost too conveniently which I didn’t enjoy as much in such a bleak tale.

The Best Near-Future Dystopias | Five Books Expert

Another frustration I can feel is that, often, the books without hope are considered stronger or more literary or realer—as if the books with hope have somehow been airbrushed. But I think the latter are actually more realistic. The region has been frequently ill-served by its politicians too. In the early 1980s a Tory councillor got six years for fraud and forgery. Jonathan Aitken was the MP for South Thanet when he was convicted and imprisoned for perjury. A decade ago a former Conservative leader of the council went to prison for property-related misdemeanours carried out during his time in office. The journey begins in Australia, increasingly taking centre stage because it sits below the world’s most economically and militarily powerful dictatorship – China.

That book is very different in tone, but it’s similar in its brilliance, and that you have a female narrator in her teens. In How I Live Now, the narrator’s mum has died and her dad has sent her to England to stay with her cousins who are wild marauders who live in a large country house. War breaks out while she’s there. The interesting thing in this novel is that—unlike Ann in Z is for Zachariah who is quite self-contained and quite spartan throughout—the How I Live Now narrator has very teenage preoccupations and energy and spunk, and the war is happening at great remove from them until it suddenly intervenes. Dystopias put you in a world where characters have to fight to survive. It makes all those structures of society that make life sanitised and safe suddenly disappear” My girlfriend’s the one to speak to about that. She’s a diplomatic advisor to the Marshall Islands, low-lying islands in the Pacific which are an average of 6ft above current sea levels. She says, and for what it’s worth, I entirely agree with her: “We have to stay optimistic. Failure is not an option, because mass devastation is the alternative. Those on the frontlines of climate crisis fight in every forum for this. Ultimately we can’t let interests of a few cause destruction for so many.” You have to hope, and you have to fight. A “goofy white boy” with song-writing chops, he heads to America, sees Opal perform in a nightclub, and persuades her to work with him. The duo make a record which achieves cult status.



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