Crude Britannia by James Marriott and Terry Macalister review – a harrowing read

A story of missed opportunities and industrial decline is told with rare insight and vivacity

This November the eyes of the world will turn to Glasgow. Cop26 meeting is last chance, says Alok Sharma as he backs UK's plan for new oil and gas fields," the Observer reported in an interview with the Tory minister in charge. The contradiction in this sentence is all the proof you need of the central themes of Crude Britannia: that Britain's economic prosperity is inextricably linked to oil, and that breaking this link appears a more distant prospect than human extinction.

Journeying through landscapes of rigs and refineries, from the Thames estuary to north-east Scotland, campaigner James Marriott and former Guardian energy editor Terry Macalister interweave history and psychogeography. This is refreshing if not seamless: as the narrative style shifts from reportage to the rhythms of speech and prayer you would find in a David Peace novel, it is easy to mistake stylised prose for casual errors and incomplete sentences - of which, unfortunately, there are several.