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

Product Information

If you have been paying attention to the world of late, wrapped up rather despairingly as it is in pandemic, war, climate change and creeping intolerance and extremism, it will not surprise you that hope is in short supply for many people. In the coastal resort of Margate, hotels lie empty and sun-faded ‘For Sale’ signs line the streets. The sea is higher – it’s higher everywhere – and those who can are moving inland. A young girl called Chance, however, is just arriving. Climate change brings scorching summers and rising sea levels; there’s a great “washout” early in the book, a huge tide surging through the town causing devastating floods and drownings, something that becomes a more regular occurrence until townsfolk plan their day’s movements by the high tide times that make the streets impassable. London is still a dominant global financial powerhouse and the UK also has an astonishing output of culture, both of which earn immense sums for UK plc. It is also seeking new alliances but fears the economic and military consequences of an ­independent Scotland. Margate in particular has seen its fortunes become decidedly mixed in recent decades. By the 1980s the once thriving holiday destination saw its hotels and guesthouses being converted into cheap bedsits, where there was money to be made by landlords trousering government money to house the poor and vulnerable displaced from London and other parts of the south-east by a combination of austerity and the ever-rising cost of living.

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

This march to an increasingly unjust society rife with social inequality and political extremism is documented through the eyes of Chance, a young girl-then-woman who has been brought to the fading coastal resort of Margate by her once middle class, now junkie mother who has a predilection for choosing the entirely wrong type of men. Set on the Kent coast, her dystopian novel imagines a terrifying future, disturbingly close to home. Many of the issues she explores are based in fact. Deep-rooted inequality, extreme weather conditions and the implementation of harsh policies against the vulnerable are all recognisably part of the world we live in today. Rankin-Gee underlines this reality by including relevant sources at the end of her novel. Dreamland suggests one possible ending to the bleak trajectory we are on.

The setting is Margate, sometime in the all too near future. “Shoreditch-on-Sea”, as it once was known, has gone from offering “charity shops, chip shops, shut shops” to food banks and “kem”, a drug on which the locals are hooked. Narrator Chance arrived as a small child, funded by the government to leave an overcrowded London along with her protective big brother, JD, and Jas, their young mother, an art school dropout whose brightness is dimmed by addiction. Eventually, JD’s pumped-up, volatile business partner, Kole, joins their band and later a baby boy named Blue arrives. ‘Liquid grace’: Rosa Rankin-Gee.

Dreamland: A warning from Britain’s post-Brexit future Dreamland: A warning from Britain’s post-Brexit future

I looked out of the window and along the coast. There was this spreading out of light, all of it like fern unfolding in a nature documentary.” A combination of both – we are simultaneously experiencing a housing crisis and a climate crisis. In this country, they haven’t come close to peaking – or clashing together – in full force yet, but they will, and it will be devastating. CHARLIE CONNELLY on a superb new novel which creates a horrifyingly plausible near-future for Margate. Yes, you’ll be interrupting each other, responding to previous points, or firing off messages part-written, in chunks, to avoid long gaps of ‘silence’.From there it's a downward spiral,drugs,men,drink... and that's before the massive climate change and collapse of government. Additionally, growing up in a coastal town that has never recovered from the impact of international holidays, combined with working in London today, I'd say the book is extremely accurate for the disparity between the capital and the coastal towns experiences. The book is accessible and opens discussions on a very real issue today, where citizens are being encouraged out of London into these commuter towns which don't receive anywhere near as much support. Chance and Franky’s relationship becomes an escape from the reality of Chance’s situation, although this becomes fraught with questions and secrecy. Franky��s link to the area is an interesting development, and her character is a well-utilised juxtaposition to Chance. 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. And yet in Rosa Rankin-Gee’s superbly gripping and deeply, emotionally resonant novel, Dreamland, where all of these disturbing trends have reached a nightmarishly definitive crescendo, when hope and the capacity for fierce unconditional love should have reached an irretrievable nadir, the ability to believe in better things to come is somehow still alive, and if not well, at least present and accounted for.