Sharrukin's Palace

The Drowning Land by David M. Donachie

Overall Rating: **** (4 stars)

The Drowning Land is a piece of prehistorical fiction, set in northern Europe a little over eight thousand years ago. It’s an adventure story, a romance, and a disaster novel all rolled into one, set in a land that literally sank beneath the sea in the distant past. The result is an interesting and entertaining read.

This review is based on an advance review copy (ARC) shared with me by the author. The final published version may differ slightly from what I’ve read.

Edan is a young member of a Mesolithic tribe, dark-skinned and blue-eyed people, who live in what he thinks of as “the Summer Lands.” Edan’s tribe have lived there from time out of mind, migrating between the coast and the highlands every year in response to the seasons. Their lives are driven by ancient tradition, but they may soon be faced with a crisis that tradition will never help them solve. For the Summer Lands are sinking beneath the waters of the sea, and many are afraid they will soon vanish altogether.

This isn’t a piece of fantasy. The Summer Lands are, in fact, Doggerland – a region that once acted as a land bridge, connecting the British Isles to the continent of Europe. At one time, Doggerland may have been one of the richest countries inhabited by human beings. Yet as the climate shifted following the end of the last Ice Age, Doggerland was eventually submerged beneath the North Sea. Today, its remnants form the “Dogger Bank,” an underwater feature off the eastern shores of Britain.

At the beginning of the story, Edan and his tribe are already struggling to survive. Not only is the once-rich country being slowly poisoned by rising salt water, but other tribes are responding to the crisis by becoming fierce and aggressive. Edan’s people meet one such group, a band of renegades who have taken predatory wolves as their totem, led by a war-chieftain named Phelan. At first, the contact promises to be peaceful, but when Edan rescues a young woman from the other band and accidentally kills one of Phelan’s followers, the consequences are severe.

Edan and the young woman, Tara, are forced to flee together for their lives. Tara, it turns out, is a “troll,” not quite what Edan’s people would recognize as human. In fact, she is from a tribe that has significant Neanderthal ancestry. She is also a visionary, cursed with foreknowledge that the Summer Lands will be drowned within months, on a quest to see if the spirit world can be roused to prevent the disaster.

What follows is a small odyssey, as Edan and Tara travel from one end of the Summer Lands to the other, fleeing from Phelan’s people and the rising seas, visiting other tribes, and seeking a solution to the imminent end of their world. Along the way they both grow and change, and they fall in love. Their fate, and the fate of the entire Summer Lands, is bound up in the rest of the story.

Once I got past the first few chapters of The Drowning Land – which felt a little slow of pace – I found it a compelling story. Edan and Tara are sympathetic characters, and even villains like Phelan have depth to them. As a piece of historical fiction, the story is very thoroughly researched and plausible; Mr. Donachie has certainly done his homework. I was rather reminded of some of Jean Auel’s work.

The story shifts viewpoints with each new chapter, a technique I don’t always appreciate, although Mr. Donachie does take care to label each chapter so that the reader won’t be confused. The prose was also not quite as clean as I usually want to see, with a few typos, and occasional mis-paragraphing during dialogue. None of this rose above the level of a minor distraction, nor did it pull me out of the story.

On the whole, The Drowning Land should work well for anyone who’s interested in historical fantasy, or tales of human survival under punishing circumstances. Recommended.