YOU could dedicate a lifetime to reading dystopian novels. As for utopian ones, a week of solid reading would see you through the best of them. There’s a reason utopias don’t appear much in literature. Everyone can imagine what catastrophe looks like; peace and happiness on earth, however, is far more elusive. But also, where’s the drama in everyone agreeing with each other? In John Burnside’s curious short novel Havergey, Ben, or The Watcher, tells the protagonist, John, that “you get to Utopia, or something like it, by having a dream, or building a time machine. William Morris – A Dream of John Ball, H.G. Wells, Ray Bradbury – The Toynbee Convector.”

John uses a time machine – unless the whole story is a dream, which is possible. In 2017 he volunteers to “travel forward to the year 2050” to find out what has happened to the planet “weather-wise” and to see if he can convey the information back to the present. The powers that be think future hindsight will help protect what is left on their polluted and overpopulated earth. When John sets off he isn’t really bothered about returning. When you’ve given up on the world, why not give time travel a go, just for the hell of it? So he steps into Tardis B (there is a running joke about the kitsch nature of time travel), and emerges on the Scottish island of Havergey some fifty years later.

Ben, who’s expecting him, or someone, quickly fills him in on the intervening years. During “The Collapse” or “The Dark Time” the world’s population reached a tipping point and the ecosystem could not cope. Disease swept away millions. It turns out James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis was spot on. Ben explains that the current residents on Havergey were all nomads who escaped the mainland and found themselves together on the island. They also found an archive of writings — mostly diary entries — that the previous inhabitants left behind and use these to create their new society.

John is put into quarantine, which is a little too comfortable. Most of the novel from herein is composed of scraps of “The Archive” that John reads and his consequent discussions with Ben, who, in John’s words, can be “irritating” and, in mine, can be a real bore. The actual Havergey is kept at a distance. If we are to believe Ben, the community follow the philosophy outlined in the ancient Chinese text the Tao Te Ching, or “The Scholar’s” interpretation of it: “If…I was trying to set Utopia in motion, I would say that this would have to be the basic principle of that community: that Nature, meaning Tao, or the overarching order of natura naturans that can only be observed in a state of grace, would always take priority, in our hearts and minds, over any human scheme – however worthy (or profitable) it might seem – that was not in keeping with that natural order.” It sounds lovely, until we realise violence is sometimes needed to preserve the natural order of things.

We never find out what the real Havergey is like, which is perhaps the point of this uneven novel, which could not be one at all in some places. It’s part meditation on the concept of utopia, or how to achieve it, and part ecological rant. What saves Burnside is the strength of his vision, and the book’s form, which reflects the state of his fictional world. The question that keeps cropping up is: once the planet’s wrecked, how do you start again? After reading Havergey, a line from TS Eliot’s The Waste Land comes to mind: “these fragments I have shored against my ruins”. The islanders build a new world from the remnants of the old. Utopia is something they work towards, but they know that even if it arrived, it would be gone quicker than they could say Thomas More.

That a writer is drawn to utopias or dystopias says a good deal about how their imagination works. JG Ballard’s novels show he couldn’t stop thinking about abandoned swimming pools and disused tower blocks. In Aldous Huxley’s last novel, Island, the characters achieve harmony through a blend Eastern philosophy and psychedelic drugs. Whatever Havergey says about Burnside, it’s his third book this year, and it’s still only lambing season. Aside from a hefty advance, that kind of work rate is probably as close to a real utopia as a writer can get. His publicity schedule, however, could be looking frighteningly dystopic.

Havergey by John Burnside is published by Little Toller Books, priced £12