The land beneath the sea

Somewhere deep in the water-thick layers of Time Song, Julia Blackburn says, funnily, that in Danish, ‘the word for book is bog’.And Time Song itself is a kind of beautiful bog, a memoir-cum-meditation focusing on the stretch of land that once connected Britain to the Continent but was drowned by the rising waters at the end of the Ice Age. It is a subject for now — where for God’s sake would Brexit be if Essex and Yorkshire were still parts of the lower Rhineland? — but Blackburn’s thoughts run deeper than that, to the long and subtle conversation between the present and past, to the preservations of time and its erosions.

Chapter by chapter she explores Doggerland, the past and herself, laying down one tissue-thin piece of time after another, each layer concealing the life that once lived on the surface, so that time itself becomes a kind of enclosing and preservative substance, but one that can be opened or washed away.