Here is an eerie story of the near-future. Two men live on a decaying wind farm, trying to keep it going with limited supplies. They are only very irregularly sent food from wherever the mainland is, and that food is all canned. The younger man in particular does not seem to have ever eaten any food that was not canned. It’s unclear what exactly is going on in the wider world, but whatever it is, it’s not good. Probably the most striking part of this book for me was the evocation of the ocean itself, which is empty of fish but full of garbage. It’s the logical and even likely conclusion of the current direction we’re in, and I just hope I don’t live to see it. Try this:
“The boy sat in the galley and unpicked the last tangle of plastic from his line. He’d gone out to check on it, to pass some time, and found a huge shoal of bags that had drifted in overnight – a dark mass, silent and heavy, hanging in the fields as if they were waiting for something.”
One of the men is constantly ‘fishing,’ but not for fish (there aren’t any) but we guess for signs of the cities now submerged. I didn’t quite get into the plot, which was mostly focused on the younger man, who had apparently been forced to come to the wind farm when his father ran away. A lot went on about how he found out his father didn’t really abandon him, and how the older man is a beloved father figure in any case, and etc etc. Various versions of daddy issues in other words. But I didn’t really care, the setting was so frightening and fully realized.