Waterland

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 show more 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. show less

Graham Swift is an amazing writer!

This is a story about the power of story-telling; the ability of stories to change lives. Tom Crick, a fifty-something history teacher, abandons the course curriculum and tells his students his own life story. In doing so, he rekindles their interest in history as a subject.

And what a story he has to tell. Along with the usual coming-of-age rituals of experimenting with sex and alcohol, there is incest, madness and murder. All told with Mr. Swift's wonderful way of balancing what is said with what is not, winding around events going ever deeper into motivations and causes.

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 show more 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. show less

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, show more 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. show less

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 show more 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." show less

A slow but, I think, worthwhile read. The cover on my edition has a blurb from The New York Times that calls this book, "A gothic family saga, a detective story and a philosophical meditation on the nature and use of history". That describes 'Waterland' pretty well. The other word that describes this book is, "Exhausting". There is an exhausting level of detail in exploring the regional and familial history of the narrator. Swift's use of sentence structure can also be exhausting; he has a tendency to interject extraneous phrases - with no immediate sense of purpose and with nary a warning, seemingly to show off his wordsmithery rather than to propel the reader in any specific direction - into his sentences, (yes, that was an example). show more To be fair, it mostly works pretty well, but there are times where it becomes irritating. If you can work past the multitude of mini-digressions inherent in this style of writing, then lurking within, you will find an interesting tale. But you will need some patience to sift it out of the silty fenlands of Swift's imagination. show less

Masterful, engaging and hugely sweeping epic of the fens and ones man’s life

Why are the Fens flat? So God has a clear view..

Deep breath. Oh where to start and how to describe. This is the story of one man’s life, a desperate monologue from a teacher at the end of his days to his last class. It is the story of his ancestors, their wayward paths culminating in this moment. It is a fascinating look at history of the waterlogged wet lands, of the flat muddy fens in east England and its never ending fight against water. It is an ambitious take on the broad sweep of geography and politics, of good beer and the sex lives of eels. It is a mesmerising exploration of myths and superstitions, of the lies and tragedies, of hope and curiosity show more of the fens. It is a gripping tale of insanity and murder, of love and gods. An intelligent take on what history means and what it’s for. It is a meta-fictional, wry take on the nature of biographies and all their glories and deceptions and a beautiful playful poke at literary structure. It is a story of stories.

CHILDREN, CHILDREN, who will inherit the world. Children (for always, even though you fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, candidates for that appeasing term ‘young adults’, I addressed you silently as ‘children’) - children, before whom I have stood for thirty-two years in order to unravel the mysteries of the past, but before I am to stand no longer, listen, one last time to your history teacher.

For this is 52 yr old Tom Crick’s last story, an acknowledgement of all that connects him to this moment, of the sweeping tide of history that has carried him to this ephinany of his life. It is at its heart a damn good yarn, a beautiful, heartfelt.. well tragedy or happy, reaffirming redemption? That my friends would be a spoiler.

That Swift managed to write an engaging story in the format of a monologue, that he manages to pack so much in without the dissolution of the whole, that he can weave back and forth in time without confusion and slowly, carefully unfurl a page turning story whilst grappling with heavy weighty themes is stunning. As Swift says in the forward he felt he could get with away with anything and he was right. It may not be to your taste, but it’s a fascinating and easy read nonetheless, one that works on so many levels, ones I haven’t even had space to discuss, I really wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to anyone.

“But man - let me offer you a definition - is the storytelling animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting marker-buoys and trail-signs of stories. He has to go on telling stories. He has to keep on making them up. As long as there's a story, it's all right. Even in his last moments, it's said, in the split second of a fatal fall - or when he's about to drown - he sees, passing rapidly before him, the story of his whole life.”

Highly recommended, one of the best books of the year. show less