Shortly after her husband’s death, Blackburn became fascinated with Doggerland, the stretch of land that once connected Great Britain to Continental Europe but is now subsumed by the North Sea. In Time Song, Blackburn brings us along on her journey to discover what Doggerland left behind.
Julia Blackburn—who lives on the Suffolk coast—is an ideal guide to such territory, her oblique, allusive paragraphs leavening pure pedagogy with memoir and the often startling richness of her own imagination ... Suffice to say, Time Song is not a straightforward book about Doggerland. It is much more interesting than that ... A book like this could easily be dry and academic, or if not, very heavy on the singular first person pronoun. But Time Song is richly peopled, Blackburn’s unflagging curiosity and sharp eye bringing a diverse cast of characters vividly to life. She sifts their stories not just for information, but for meaning; she’s conjuring for us not merely the facts of Doggerland, but the weight of its omission from our history books, our collective memory and our imaginations.
Blackburn has a talent for envisioning bygone worlds ... Time Song jumps between vast epochs of time as Blackburn ponders the history of the English coast and its counterpart in the Netherlands ... Unfortunately, many of the glimpses the reader gets are in the form of strange, somewhat awkward prose poems Blackburn calls 'time songs.' There are 18 of them, and they contain some of the book’s most interesting facts and ideas ... But the format is distracting. The book also bogs down in descriptions of the eccentric collectors Blackburn meets, whose homes and garages overflow with the bones of extinct rhinos and the teeth of bygone shrews. These scenes drag on, with no real forward momentum.
Blackburn conducts her investigations by way of a sort of stubborn pottering. It is research as beachcombing, patiently sifting, waiting to see what the tide has brought in. The story of Doggerland and its enigmatic inhabitants accumulates via dreamy, seemingly half-distracted anecdotes and encounters ... These encounters are interspersed by what Blackburn calls 'time songs', 18 elliptical, quasi-poetic summaries of books and interviews, condensing dense compendia of information into something not so much like songs as lecture notes ... They share a slightly awkward quality, but what they do transmit is a sense of intense effort, like being with someone who is listening very hard ... Vanished but close, Doggerland serves as a ready metaphor for lost things, the extinct and the dead. Perhaps it’s simply a mark of Blackburn’s attention to fragility, but it’s noticeable that many of her Doggerland interlocutors are ill, limping after Lyme disease or crippled with spinal muscular atrophy.
