Book review: Dreamland by Rosa Rankin-Gee

Dreamland by Rosa Rankin-Gee

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It must have been around 2010 when I first heard about working class families being moved out of London. I worked at the time for the London Borough of Kensington and Chelsea – the richest borough in Europe and also the most conservative. Despite its wealth, it was that period after the 2008 crash when the Tory government was trying to cut back on everything, including “undesirables” who lived in council housing in prime locations.

I’ve learned more recently through a documentary that this has been going on for quite some time, as far back as the creation of Canary Wharf, London’s new financial zone, where entire council estates were moved out of London to make way for new developments. One story stuck in my mind: of an elderly woman who lived alone and relied on her neighbours for help, suddenly moved away and placed in a completely foreign town, with nobody she knew.

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 risen and the rich are moving further inland. One such family happens to be Chance’s, the young queer narrator of this novel, who gets moved around from hostel to hostel with her brother and mother, until finally settling in Margate, a once thriving English seaside town that crumbled when cheap holiday flights became available to Europe. Life is at first OK for Chance, she makes friends in town and learns to scavenge abandoned homes. But as the ocean moves further and further inland, their lives fall apart.

Chance tells the story to her lesbian lover Frankie, almost in an epistolary style. It’s a narrative devise that makes the story feel very intimate. I was also reminded of recent dystopia novels. The way these characters live very mundane lives in a world set up against them was reminiscent of Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Never Let Me Go”, but also J.G. Ballard’s “The Drowned World”, when the ocean levels start to rise (there are also other Ballardian themes, like class warfare and the breakdown of technology). Survivors create a vegetable garden on a building rooftop, not unlike the God’s Gardeners in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy. And, finally, when society has properly collapsed, we get survival of the fittest reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road”.

It took Rosa 7 years to write this novel. I’m guessing a lot of the time was spent polishing the similes, which are laid out aplenty and are very good. It’s the first novel I read where COVID-19 is mentioned – it must have been worked into the plot towards the end, just before the final proofs were signed off. Here are some of the similes I really liked:

“The squawks of seagulls were like someone hammering on a doorbell.”
“The sun that night was a perfect coin as it slotted down into the sea.”
“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.”
“On the wires between his building and the one across the street, there were sparrows perched, evenly spaced, like fairy lights.”
“We headed west past the station, the opposite direction to the harbour, past old hotels, the awnings above each window fluttering like eyelashes in the wind.”
“In the morning, some of the wind turbines out at sea had lost propellers. They looked like daisies with their petals ripped off.”

A few threads are left loose by the end, and the final scene is a cliff-hanger of sorts, which leads me to suspect there will be a sequel. I really hope there is! Perhaps with Frankie telling her story back to Chance?

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