Waterland

By Graham Swift

FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF LAST ORDERS AND MOTHERING SUNDAY, reissued for the first time in Scribner

One summer morning in 1943, lock-keeper Henry Crick finds the drowned body of a sixteen-year-old boy. Nearly forty years later, his son Tom, a history teacher, is driven by a bizarre marital crisis and the provocation of one of his students to forsake the formal teaching of history—and tell stories . . .

Waterland is a classic of modern fiction: a vision of England seen through its mysterious, amphibious Fen country; a sinuous meditation on the workings of time; a tale of two families, startling in its twists and turns and universal in its reach. Compulsively readable, it is a novel of resonant depth and encyclopaedic richness, mixing human and natural history and exploring the tragic forces that take us both forwards and back. It is also a book about beer, eels, the French Revolution, the end of the world, windmills, will-o’-the-wisps, murder, love, education, curiosity and—supremely—the malign and merciful element of water.

‘A quite brilliant novel’ Daily Telegraph

‘Inspired’ New York Times
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Release date: Jul 11, 2019
• ISBN: 9781471187339

Graham Swift

Graham Swift was born in 1949 and is the author of eleven novels, two collections of short stories, including the highly acclaimed England and Other Stories, and of Making an Elephant, a book of essays, portraits, poetry and reflections on his life in writing. His most recent novel, Mothering Sunday, became an international bestseller and won The Hawthornden Prize for best work of imaginative literature. With Waterland he won the Guardian Fiction Prize, and with Last Orders the Booker Prize. Both novels were made into films. His work has appeared in over thirty languages.

Reviews for Waterland

[steve02476 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.

[jostie13 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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.

[azbob1951 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

On page 158, I gave up. What in the world is this book about and who would find it interesting enough to read 358 pages to find out?

[quondame · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.

[thornton37814 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Tom Crick, a middle-aged history teacher, faces job termination due to consolidation of history into a more general subject area. He spends more time discussing events local to the Fens and his own story than the subject of history. He also faces challenges at home as his wife suffered a mental breakdown. Swift's writing style is unique. This book would lend itself well to a book group for discussion as readers will engage with the narrative differently.

[niecierpek · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An idiosycratic, complex and thought provoking novel about history, progress and primeval instincts of life to exist. Really interesting, but narratated as one, long, protracted story the following of which I found somewhat tedious.

[theholyllama · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A history teacher, Tom Crick, nearing the end of his career abandons the demands of his curriculum, forsaking the French Revolution for the story of his own life and that of his home, the Fens of East Anglia. The events of his childhood and the repurcussions they have in the present day are the core of this novel, but it is made clear that the flat Fens landscape plays just as much a part in the novel as any of the characters, reinforcing the sense of isolation that haunts the lives of Crick and his family and acquaintances.Swift weaves a detailed, multi-layered fictional history of the landscape and those who have shaped it over centuries seamlessly into the intimate dramas of one man. I found the plot took a while to get going but once it did the various nuggests of new information and scandalous developments in the various parallel plot lines meant that this is a serious, literary novel that nevertheless grips you with the intensity of an airport page-turner.Personally I found Swift's style to contain some slightly annoying tics, but once the plot picks up the pace these become less obtrusive.

[scolgo · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

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). 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.

[kristelh_15 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

REVIEWI started this book expecting I might dislike it. I did dislike the topic of incest but was key to the story which is really a detective story and so much more. A fictional autobiography being told by Tom Crick as he teaches his students about why history. It is meditative; exploring fate, responsibility and history. Tom tells the story of his family’s roots and the Fen area of East Anglia. It also is a story of storytelling. OPENING LINE:Epigram: Historia, -ae, f. 1. inquiry, investigation, learning. 2. a) a narrative of past events, history. b) any kind of narrative: account, tale, story. “And don’t forget’, my father would say, as if he expected me at any moment to up and leave to seek my fortune in the wide world, ‘whatever you learn about people, however bad they turn out, each one of them has a heart, and each one of them was once a tiny baby sucking his mother’s milk….’QUOTES:Until a series of encounters with the Here and Now gave a sudden urgency to my studies. Until the Here and Now, gripping me by the arm, slapping my face and telling me to take a good look at the mess I was in, informed me that history was no invention but indeed existed — and I had become a part of it. Supposing it's the other way round. Supposing it's revolutions which divert and impede the course of our inborn curiosity. Supposing it's curiosity — which inspires our sexual explorations and feeds our desires to hear and tell stories — which is our natural and fundamental state of mind. Supposing it's our insatiable and feverish desire to know about things, to know about each other, always to be sniff-sniffing things out, which is the true and rightful subverter and defeats even our impulse for historical progression.Children, only animals live entirely in the Here and Now. Only nature knows neither memory nor history. Man man — let me offer you a definition — is the story-telling 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. WORDS:Fen: a type of wetland, fens are a kind of mire.Fabianism: British socialist organisation whose purpose is to advance the principles of socialism via gradualist and reformist meansAtavism: tendency to revert to ancestral type. In biology, an atavism is an evolutionary throwback, such as traits reappearing which had disappeared generations before.jingoism: patriotism in the form of aggressive foreign policy. Jingoism also refers to a country's advocation of the use of threats or actual forceCLOSING LINE:On the bank in the thickening dusk, in the will-o’ the wisp dusk, abandoned but vigilant, a motorcycle. RATING: very good

[pilgrimjess · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

“That's the way it is: life includes a lot of empty space. We are one-tenth living tissue, nine-tenths water; life is one-tenth Here and Now, nine-tenths a history lesson. For most of the time the Here and Now is neither now nor here.” Tom Crick is a history teacher about to be sacked because of something that his wife has done and because both his students and the school Head cannot see the relevance of the topic in today's world. So he decides to abandon the syllabus and instead tell his class about his and his family's history on the Fens rather than about the French Revolution thats he supposed to be teaching,Without wanting to sound jingoistic I believe that,certainly in the latter years of their education, that children, wherever they are in the world, should be taught about their own countries History rather than that of some place that they might never visit thus giving them a background to their own lives. Therefore I loved the idea of History teacher going off piste like this.Despite being only about 300 pages long this is a 'vast' novel that touches on so many topics. Ranging from the Fens and in particular their reclamation from the sea,childhood and sense of place in later life, incest, sexual awakening, family ties, murder and suicide, eels and even a post apocalyptic world to name but a some. However, probably the most over-riding question is why do humans feel the need to tell stories?Overall I enjoyed the author's writing style and his descriptions of the vast flatness on the Fens was very evocative but I must also admit that I got a little bogged down in the prose on occasions. Hence it does not quite get full marks but still a very enjoyable read.

[vaellus · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Somewhat interesting, but I found the narrator's avuncular charm distinctly uncharming. Another complaint is the water metaphor that started to feel crude and overdone in the first 50 pages already. I expected more from this book, even the writing itself was a disappointment.

[miketroll · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A splendid, almost epic historic tale by a fine writer. Water is in effect the central character in the narrative. Swift charts the progress of generations of Fenland people and their constant struggles against the encroaching sea. Like the Netherlands, the Fenlands of East Anglia demand constant drainage and vigilance against the ever-present threat of flooding. Fenland drainage began back in the 17th century, when it was first undertaken on a large scale by Dutch immigrants. (The word “fen” is itself cognate with the Dutch “veen” – low, reedy, marshy ground regularly inundated by the tides.) As in Holland, the work continues to this day.

[ehines_20 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Faulknerian in the sense that it is deeply concerned with the mark history leaves upon us, the degree to which things may be laid out for us by what's happened before.Not Faulknerian in the clarity of its prose. And unfortunately not Faulknerian in creating a sense of community/continuity/meaning-giving context for the story to take place in.Maybe that's partially the point, but without that context, the power of history is so much the less in Waterland compared to Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, and the fact that history's big events (someone getting killed or injured in WWI) impact people's lives really isn't revelatory.Maybe the true point of the novel is that the narrator is quite wrong: the problem isn't that history binds us in hidden ways, but that it doesn't really. All we really get from the past is a bunch of circumstances we tend to take for granted and an old chest full of notes we can't read and some powerful intoxicants.

[helenleech · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The accidental drowning of a young man in a fenland drainage canal... but is the death accidental? What's the connection to the history teacher, whose wife has become a baby-snatcher?

[lynnb_64 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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.

[oldblack-1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Meh. I got up to p.78 but found it to be just boring history. There was a story in there somewhere about a modern era history teacher, but that was just too small a component of the book up to this point to keep me going. It was vaguely interesting to read about this lowland area in England...but I'm too old to spend more time on this work when there's better books (I hope!) on my 'to be read' list.

[clfisha · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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 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.

[klp.krista · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I had a very love hate relationship with this book, I heard such great things about it and it just didn't really live up to my expectations. I think my biggest problem was how drawn out it was. I just felt like everything took ten times the amount of reasonable time needed to explain. I think I must have missed something that other people see in this book. It really did have a few very insightful lines in it and the plot line was actually very good, but some of it felt like the author was trying to make a long complicated book out of a fairly short story. There was a lot of history in the beginning which was actually quite hard for me to get through but when it shifted back to the actual story I couldn't put it down. I just wish it had spent more time on the actual story and not made itself lead heavy in detail. The vocabulary used though is great and its beautifully written, just not for me.

[leowillemse · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Brilliant book in which fiction, history,psychology and landscape all fit together in a fascinating story of mystery. Not an easy book, you have to read it carefully , slowly, but you'll be rewarded.

[thorold_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.

[bookomaniac-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Ingenieuze constructie: een mengeling van een autobiografisch verhaal, een detectiveverhaal over een moord, beschouwingen over geschiedenis, een familie-reconstructie en een voorstelling van Fenland, het uitgestrekt veengebied ten noordoosten van de Engelse stad Cambridge. Vooral naar het einde toe wordt er duchtig over en weer gesprongen in tijd en ruimte.Hoofdpersonage is Tom Crick, geschiedenisleraar, en dramatische momenten uit zijn leven vormen de kapstokken van het verhaal. Vooral de korte beschouwingen bij wat geschiedenis eigenlijk is, wat de rol is van verhalen in het leven en of het leven eigenlijk alleen maar verhaal is (in postmodernistische stijl dus), vond ik erg interessant. Swift heeft een heel goed inzicht in de relativiteit maar ook de grote kracht van het geschiedenisvorsen. Het verhaal zelf kon me zeker boeien, maar er steken ook heel wat zwakke elementen in. Het slot was eerder teleurstellend, alsof Swift niet goed wist hoe hij er een einde aan kon breien.

[lilyroseshadowlyn · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Although meandering at times, this was an enjoyable read. I enjoyed Swift's style, and although not my favorite author, I will probably read more of his books in the future. I like the idea of a history teacher, whose life has taken a turn he could never have anticipated, suddenly departing from typical history lessons to instead relate his own history and the history of his family to his students. A last hurrah, a last attempt to immortalize himself perhaps...An understandable impulse as it is only by looking back that we can move forward with any real confidence. Those who ignore the past are fools who all too often are doomed to repeat it.

[whitewavedarling · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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.