#BlogTour ‘Dreamtime’ by Venetia Welby

About the book…

So, where is he then, your dad?’

The world may be on a precipice but Sol, fresh from Tucson-desert rehab, finally has an answer to the question that has dogged her since childhood. And not a moment too soon. With aviation grinding to a halt in the face of global climate meltdown, this is the last chance to connect with her absentee father, a US marine stationed in Okinawa.

To mend their broken past Sol and her lovelorn friend Kit must journey across poisoned oceans to the furthest reaches of the Japanese archipelago, a place where sea, sky and earth converge at the forefront of an encroaching environmental and geopolitical catastrophe; a place battered by the relentless tides of history, haunted by the ghosts of its past, where the real and the virtual, the dreamed and the lived, are ever harder to define. In Dreamtime Venetia Welby paints a terrifying and captivating vision of our near future and takes us on a vertiginous odyssey into the unknown

Published in paperback by Salt , ‘Dreamtime’ by Venetia Welby , I am grateful to Helen Richardson PR for my gifted review copy and the chance to share my thoughts on the blog today!

This book is such a unique experience, it takes you to a place where you have to hand yourself over to the narrative, and trust that you will, more or less, return.

It has a narcotic effect as it transports you to a near future, and the final ceremony that Dreamtime are putting addict, Sol, through before she is considered ‘cured’ and is released to the world beyond the dome, to the arid ,dry deserts of Arizona. But the last gift that this place gives her, is an unasked for, and , to be frank, unwanted reconnection with her mother who, during a rebirthing process, tells Sol that the person she grew up thinking was her father, actually isn’t.

The sweet and bitter irony of this one act, the mother making the birthing task which is meant to free Sol from this state of false belief, all about her, and sending Sol headlong into another truth that she longs to be true, is poignant as hell.

With the constantly threatened climate change and natural disasters actually happening, and changing the world we currently know, it has been decided that people will no longer be allowed to travel , commercially, around the world. Sol has one last chance, she is the centre of the world post recovery for her childhood companion, Kit, and so they both take off for Tokyo before they are stuck, wherever they land, forever.

The juxtaposition of reality, dreams and achievement of that wishful thinking which we work through in our subconscious, is so well reflected by the East versus West comparison that Venetia makes so very well. The dry nature of America, representing the West, where dreams are literal ash and dust that cannot wash off, is exchanged for that of Tokyo, wet, damp, and oppressively built into sky high cities. The contrast is literal and metaphorical, forcing a sea change in Kit and Sol, both raised in the Dreamtime ‘cult’ (though they do not recognise it as such, not really) and who have used addiction to escape those experiences. And yet, somehow, they both end up in that peculiar space between want and need.

I loved the way that my perceptions of what I was reading were toyed with so succinctly, it is not a book you can pick up and drop, it is a story to which you surrender to. I would hesitate to pigeonhole what kind of book this is, except to say that it takes you on a journey of self recovery, self determination and self control, in a world where that has been shut away, hermetically sealed or Eastern philosophies such as yoga and cleansing rituals, are bastardised to bring Western people out of their drug addled apathy and aversion to life , strikes home very hard indeed.

It is another superb example of Salt Publishing’s fearless approach to printing that which defies explanation or neat conclusions. Thinking, ruminating and turning this story of Sol and her life over in your mind is to be allowed to wallow in a world not so far from our own.

About the author…

Venetia Welby is a writer and journalist who has lived and worked on four continents. Her debut novel Mother of Darkness was published by Quartet in 2017 and her second, Dreamtime, will be out with Salt in September 2021.

Venetia’s essays and short fiction have appeared in The Spectator, The London Magazine, Review 31 and anthologies Garden Among Fires and Trauma, among others. She lives in London with her husband, son and Bengal cat

Links-http://www.venetiawelby.com/

Twitter @venwelby @saltpublishing