I first read this novel shortly after the paperback edition was released, almost forty years ago. It had been included in the previous year’s Booker Prize shortlist, and most of the reviews had been appropriately enthusiastic. I had just started in my first proper job, and was revelling in the awareness that, after years of student penury, I could now occasionally take a chance on buying a book on a whim, rather than having to weigh up every purchase against the risk of Micawberesque misery.

And what a book! In just over three hundred pages, Graham Swift offers the reader a history of East Anglia, including insights into political strife, land reclamation, flood management, the finer points of brewing, the beguiling mysteries of the eel, the culmination of the Cold War in the early 1980s, a love story, a murder, and a cautionary tale about incest, all wrapped up in a fascinating exegesis of the nature of history itself.

Tom Crick is, for the moment, Head of History at a large comprehensive school in London, beset with domestic challenges and facing strenuous effort by his headteacher to close his department. His Sixth Form lessons have, however, bucked the trend in which disaffected pupils move away from the humanities. His lessons are swell, because word has spread among the pupils of a new approach to teaching in which Crick’s lessons are suffused with vivid recollections from his own childhood. Crick’s pupils are dejected, convinced that the world is on the brink of a final nuclear war. Forty years earlier, Crick had been growing up in Norfolk during the Second World War, where his father was a lock-keeper responsible for vital flood management in that low lying land, contending with rationing and watching regular bombing missions taking off from the air force bases spread all around the county.

Swift takes his readers through numerous flashbacks, showing how Crick’s family had come to live by the river, and painting the history of the region. The flat landscape, and numerous waterways of the region play a key part in setting the atmosphere of the story. Swift’s prose is as clear as the water in Crick’s father’s lock, and his mastery of the multiple strands of the story is immense. He merges folklore with history, and manage the cast of characters deftly.

I can’t remember which book actually won the Booker Prize when this was a challenger – it must have been jolly good to have beaten this. ( )

Liked the beautiful, wryly funny writing. I’d never heard of the author before but I read a good short story of his in the New Yorker last month so I looked him up. Guess he’s a big deal (and I’m not in the loop). I thought the ending was a bit abrupt maybe? Great thoughts about the importance and unreliability of “family history” - reminded me of Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively in that sense.
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Robert Webb, I will never forgive you for recommending this novel! I watched Between the Covers, the BBC book club with Sara Cox, to pick up some TBR tips from celebrities and Robert Webb's favourite book - "I gave it to my last two girlfriends – including my wife – and David Mitchell, and they all liked it" (ha!) - was definitely a fail.

Combining two of my most hated literary devices - smug male narrators and thinly veiled themes overloading the story - this somnambulant disaster was only good at sending me straight to sleep after ploughing through more than a paragraph. In the spirit of Stoner, pompous history teacher Tom Crick is being forced to 'retire' after his wife steals a baby and gets put away. He spends his final term holding his class hostage with a convoluted and tedious history of his life, interspersed with random lectures on the Norfolk fens, rivers, eels and even phlegm at one point (like a very British Les Mis!)

When he was a young boy, living with his widowed lockkeeper father and slow older brother (charmingly termed a 'potato head'), one of Tom's schoolfriends drowned in the river, and we poor readers spend the whole book waiting for the obvious to be confirmed - everything is always a woman's fault! Freddie Parr was pushed into the river as a (mistaken) rival for a young girl's affection. Why did older Tom's wife - the same girl at the centre of the childhood drama - steal a baby? Childhood trauma robbed her of the chance of becoming a mother, of course!

Added to the Wikipedia articles and drawn-out memoirs of a failed Dead Poets Society wannabe, we also get ridiculous melodrama in the form of local history. Two families, the Cricks and the Atkinsons, represent the past and the future of the fens, the one respecting the river and the other damming the water up and building sluice gates and locks in the spirit of Victorian progress. The Atkinsons, however, are gothic nightmares, complete with zombie wives and literal inbreeding - so of course the two families join together and the result is the narrator and his brother.

All of this water-centric madness could have been acceptable - even entertaining, like Michael McDowell's Blackwater saga - but for the writing:

And thus the history teacher—though his relation with his young charges echoes first the paternal, then the grand-paternal, though he sees in their faces (but does not admit it) less and less the image of the future, more and more that of something he is trying to retrieve, something he has lost—could always say (he acquires a penchant for paradox) that he looked back in order to look forward.

Pages and pages of pontificating drivel, punctuated with annoying half sentences - 'If she had ...', 'But then ...' No wonder I kept falling asleep! I hated Tom, adult and child/preteen - not to mention the very Stephen King preoccupation with young kids touching each other and playing 'You show me yours' that made the childhood scenes even more creepy - and that was before he kicked his pet dog so hard that he needed his jaw wiring. Yikes - why am I supposed to care about this man exactly?

For lovers of Stoner-esque characters only. ( )

Breath-taking in its juxtaposition of the water-land Fens with the watery uncertainty that washes away the narrator's attempts to historically ground his position in the world. Loved the conversational narration of the history teacher to his high school students--you'll want to read some passages aloud to yourself. ( )

An experience where actions in the Fen are foreshadowed by a three century local history of striving or making do, and those actions have consequences four decades later in Greenwich. A dense layered wrapping around the core of a completely unexplored marriage of at least 35 years. Rich and evocative and I was left feeling I must hold my breath or drown. ( )