Waterland (1983)

With raw bits of esoteric knowledge scattered throughout, and with a fair amount of reflections on the meaning and making of history, as well as teaching, this novel also proves itself as a masterful and complex story worth taking your time over. Wonderful scenes, poetic language, believable characters, and both humor and heartbreak...and, what's more, the novel feels like a step back to another time and has a clear sense of place. Simply, this is absolutely recommended, and it makes me wonder how I never got around to discovering Swift in the past. A wonderful escape and a beautiful read. ( )

Not my first book by the author, I read Last Orders wile travelling a few years ago, but I had forgotten his roundabout, yet entertaining, way of spinning a yarn.

Set in the Fens, the characters are as much tied to the land, the titular Waterland. Like the water in its springy earth, the Fens seem to move, retract and then burst their banks as the try to get back to their previous untamed state.

The book has 3 threads. The first is that of a history teacher, Crick, being given his marching orders, partly for his unorthodox teaching methods and partly because of an incident in his personal life. In his classes, he tells the students about the other two threads - the history of his family in the Fens and the death of a childhood friend, both of which have contributed to the current state of events.

Price, a clever boy in Crick's class, questions the relevance of history in a world which has a bleak, if any, future. Written in the early '80s, it is a fear that my own generation dismissed with the fall of the Iron Curtain, only for it to have reared its head again in the wake of 9/11 and the current economic crisis.

The impression you get of the Fens is that of a fierce, resistant people. Resistant to those who tried to tame the waters, independent from the world outside until it strategic position and the source of man power were discovered by the powers that be. I suppose you could argue nature versus nurture, but how can you separate the two when both seem to be governed by the Fens? Most of all, though, there is a feeling of guilt that pervades in its pages - for what has happened, whether it could have been prevented. Absent mothers and madness are two other recurring notes.

Highly recommended. ( )

A clever, ambitious, complicated novel, full of allusions to all sorts of things from Faulkner and Buddenbrooks to Moby-Dick and The Mill on the Floss, but also written somewhat in the register of the classic East Anglian crime story (from The Nine Tailors to P.D. James and Ruth Rendell).

I enjoyed it, but I'm not sure if it quite lives up to the scale of Swift’s plan for it. The style is a little bit pedestrian - not dull, but nothing to take your breath away - and the big debate about the puny efforts of human history versus the potent cycles of nature doesn't feel strikingly original. Of course, I'm reading it thirty years too late. In the 1980s, when it was at least plausible to suppose that the world might end shortly, I would have approached it in quite a different frame of mind. ( )

Did not finish.
I was lost at the point where the body showed up. Should have been a gripping moment. But didn't grip me. I gave up. ( )

Yes, there's eels. Yes, there's incest. But more importantly, there's a subtle flow of history, back and forth across the pages from the French Revolution to the nuclear days of WWII. Lessons learned from the trials and tribulations of the Crick family can easily be applied to the great events of world history, and history itself is shown to be an irresistible constant of useless baggage wrapped around dire foretelling. The world is racing to improve itself at such speeds as to dash itself across the rocks of its own progress, falling in love with the idea of complete destruction in order to break from the mindless fervor pace. Humans are the most obvious instrument and often times side effect of this juggernaut, and as Tom shows, the only thing to be done is to try and understand the facts behind the madness. Not to get THE answer, but SOME answer, delving deep and retrieving something serviceable, something that will reason out the unfortunate events and say, "Here. This is why it happened. Knowing this won't change anything, save your ability to cope. And perhaps add you to the chain of consequences propagated from this history. Your decision." ( )