Reading Dreamtime is not unlike uploading a photo onto an ‘ageing’ app. You watch in horror as the image rapidly warps into a vision of your future self — unreal and yet, entirely, eerily, possible.
Venetia Welby’s debut novel, Mother of Darkness (2017), was a dive into the grubby thrill-land of Soho, but in Dreamtime, the topography is vaster and deadlier. It is 2035, and Mother Earth has reached the limits of her patience. Climate refugees risk life and limb to reach relative safety. Sea life is no longer safe to eat or swim alongside and though there are creatures who can withstand the fierce conditions, their lives are short and their appetites, monstrous — a description which could be extended to some of the human cast.
Our journey begins in the deadly heart of the Tucson desert, where recovering addict Sol is checking out of a rehab facility; its practitioners preach ‘love and light’, which is somewhat ironic, given the brutal environment. Sol is in need of shelter in more ways than one. She lost her childhood to a cult whose dubious leader, Phoenix, spoke of the Dreamtime, a mystical realm that would one day eclipse the physical. Multiplicity characterises this novel, and Welby doesn’t offer any straight answers. There is a huge question mark over Sol’s paternity; the father she seeks might be Phoenix himself, or it might be a former US marine named Johnny Quinn. There are only flimsy clues as to the latter’s whereabouts, but they all point to the military-occupied island of Okinawa. With commercial aviation facing a ban, Sol knows that by going in search of him she runs the risk of no return. But her only true sense of ‘home’ takes the form of childhood friend and possible half-brother, Kit. Sol knows: he will follow her to whatever end.
The pair’s adventuring takes them to Tokyo, where vines invade decaying Love Hotels. From the capital, they make their way to Okinawa and encounter danger every step of the way. Though their choices consistently land them in harm’s way, Welby writes with a great deal of compassion for her protagonists. Sol — rather like the planet — has suffered at the hands of her guardians, and while Kit wrestles with his romantic feelings, he supports and cares for her as the truest of friends. Their failure to communicate is, at times, frustrating, and their proclivity for self-destruction also makes for difficult reading. But in the context of a dying world, such behaviour isn’t unthinkable. What lengths would you travel to in order to make sense of your brief life? With how much fortitude would you break the habits of a lifetime? The world at large hasn’t managed it and the clock is ticking. This urgency pulsates throughout the book. Humanity is barely functioning, and yet people like Sol wish to imbibe every experience left on the table, and at whatever cost. In this way, Dreamtime might well appeal to fans of The Beach (Alex Garland, 1996). Yes, darkness abounds, but there is still a little life to be had.
Where Welby truly excels is in her ability to make artifice acceptable. In Dreamtime, devices known as ‘Virreas’ are ubiquitous but never explained. Explanation though, is not necessary. The characters depend so much upon these gadgets that it is easy to imagine the ‘Virrea’ as successor to the mobile phone and VR, in Dreamtime, provides, if not a direct portal to the spirit world, at least a mirror of it. Are holograms any more reliable than hauntings? Are humans, for that matter? The story shape-shifts like the foxes of Japanese folklore, leaving it unclear in whom — or what — the reader can place their trust. Sea dragons thrash against chemical threat. Predators of old stalk new victims. Accents slip (and so do masks). The island of Okinawa itself is a place out of time — at once a theme park as well as a fortress; the cult of Americana imposes itself on the islanders who, try as they might, cannot escape its military boot. Among the spectres of war, there is a glimmer of J. G. Ballard’s post-apocalyptic fiction. Ballard said of his own work that it was transformational rather than destructive; he may have drowned the Earth, then burned and crystallised it, but he claimed these events were ‘all positive and good’. As for Welby, she too, delights in disorientating. In Dreamtime, there is a furring of material and psychological borders that will appall readers most effectively.
In recent times, authors such as Megan Hunter, Julia Armfield and Kazuo Ishiguro have unsettled readers precisely because of the plausibility of their dystopian fiction. In 2021, these tales feel more like prediction than parallel universe and similarly, the future in Dreamtime is bleak. Ancient tricksters and human violence spawn threat that gets under the skin.
But perhaps what is most shocking about this novel, is that at its heart, there beats that most hopeful of things — a human love story.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
A member of the Emerging Writers Programme with the London Library (2020), Charlotte Newman has written for Penguin, The London Magazine and Litro among others. She is working on her first novel, The Water Carrier, a contemporary twist on the myths behind the Zodiac.
Instagram: @charlotte.a.newman
First published in 3:AM Magazine: Monday, April 4th, 2022.