TIME SONG

Journeys in Search of a Submerged Land

By Julia Blackburn

“Do you realize that from now on, even if we are apart we will be together?” So wrote Julia Blackburn’s husband, in a fax he sent her during a long-ago period when they were newly married but living on opposite sides of the North Sea. “When I first read it,” Blackburn writes in “Time Song: Journeys in Search of a Submerged Land,” “it was a declaration of love; now it has become part of my precarious understanding of the nature of time.”

Probing that slippery concept is Blackburn’s underlying mission as she tries to see the death of her husband through the lens of lost worlds — vanished civilizations, vanished animals, vanished lands that once existed not far from where she now walks. Ghosts from the deep and deeper past are ever-present near Blackburn’s home on the southeastern coast of England, where the shorelines and estuaries, the cliffs and mud flats, yield mammoth bones, arrowheads, ancient footprints and other talismans.

Having rambled this coast for years, collecting artifacts along the way, Blackburn has become particularly fascinated by evidence of Doggerland, an inhabited land bridge between Britain and the Continent that sank into the ocean around 8,000 years ago, after the last ice age ended and sea levels rose. But while this is the “submerged land” of the subtitle, the book is less about Doggerland itself than about its absence, and about the tantalizing objects, be they fossils or faxes, that can bridge the living to the dead.