Waterland is a complex novel set in the England’s Fens. The main plot centers on the life and history of narrator Tom Crick. Tom is a middle-aged history teacher who is dealing with his wife’s recent mental breakdown and a school department that no longer values his contributions. Every day he stands in front of a class of teenagers who care little about the past. He abandons his curriculum to tell his class stories about the Fens and about his own life. Tom’s stories revolve around two periods: recent life events in the 1980s and events that occurred in 1943 when a teenager’s body was found floating in the water. As Tom tells his stories, events from the past blend with current events. Stories flow from one point to the next and blur the lines between past and present. On the surface, Waterland is a family saga that traces the narrator’s descendants back to the eighteenth century, however the novel is much more than a family saga. It is in many ways a reflection on the meaning of history and the role of the narrative. Interspersed with the plot there are many digressions on a variety of subjects including the sexual life of eels. This was an interesting and complicated book that grew on me more I read. The initial pace was very slow for me as the author described the history of the Fenlands. There was a lot of detail about the workings of the waterways and the development of the land. This detailed bored me at times and I admit that I even fell asleep a few times reading the book. Despite the slow start, there was something that kept me engaged. The writing was excellent and there was something clever about the book that make you think deeply about a variety of topics. Some of the subject matter was difficult (incest, mental illness, death & suicide, etc) and the story was a bleak one, but the author’s skill with which he writes about these things is wonderful. One of the interesting parts of the book is that it is a reflection on the meaning of history and how events are forgotten or remembered. Story telling is a central theme of this novel. I enjoyed the ways in which the river and its surrounding land, paralleled the lives of the characters. I would highly recommend this book for people who enjoy history and historical novels. It is a slow read and fairly complex but worth the effort. It is certainly not the kind of book to pick up for a light read but rather somewhat of an intellectual read that requires some concentration to fully enjoy. Quotes: “Children, only animals live entirely in the Here and Now. Only nature knows neither memory nor history. 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.”I taught you that there is never any end to that question, because, as I once defined it for you (yes, I confess a weakness for improvised definitions), history is that impossible thing: the attempt to give an account with incomplete knowledge, of actions themselves undertaken with incomplete knowledge.We believe we are going forward, towards the oasis of utopia. But how do we know--only some imaginary figure looking down from the sky (let's call him God) can know--that we are not moving in a great circle?Children, who will inherit the world. Children to whom, throughout history, stories have been told, chiefly but not always at bedtime, in order to quell restless thoughts; whose need of stories is matched only by the need of adults have of children to tell stories to, of receptacles for their stock of fairy-tales, of listening ears on which to unload those most unbelievable yet haunting of fairy-tales, their own lives; children--they are going to separate you and me.
Tom Crick, now a history teacher, is forced into retirement due to an unfortunate and ghastly act committed by his wife. Why?Tom Crick asks and seeks answers to a lot of why’s because history rides uncomfortably behind that very word, that very monosyllabic question – why?It has a strong and veritable bearing on today, this history, the past, that incident; incidents. It shapes, shakes, cautions, humiliates, and intimidates – this history.Would the gory chapters of the French revolution prove half as interesting if I told you instead of the happening of a particular day on the bridge of the Hockwell Lode, a water course draining into the river Leem, where five children stand to dive, to prove their manliness, to show it to a curious girl, standing with her hands crossed across her shoulders in an attempt to conceal the obvious. Is this where it all began? Or would the horrific incestuous relationship between a lonely father and her lovely daughter draw your attention? It can’t be vulgar, can it if they deem it to be love, both father and daughter? Or wait, maybe this would rouse your interest; a girl of fifteen getting pregnant in the hapless curiosity and discoveries of the body and then never being able to deliver a child and feeling the need to steal one at an age above 50; “God told me”, she said.History doesn't always need to be about kings and queens, wars and revolutions, countries and soldiers, little Tom Crick and his childhood sweetheart Mary Metcalf had created history too, by doing a little and by letting a lot been done. They created and let themselves be slaughtered at its altars. Everyone indulges in a history that is cunning, unbelievable, threatening, and treacherous – we all like extremities, don’t we and then we sympathize with the very pain, with the treachery, with a catastrophe, revealing unconsciously our shamelessness.THIS is what I term brilliant storytelling. A masterpiece! With every neatly arranged chapter, the author ties you to a slack string and craftily leads you through what seems to be an aimless direction, lures you with his words, creates a suspense and when the string is taut and you seem lost in digression, he snaps it back and you fall face down, pleasurably into the embrace of the primary plot and your mind races and traces in excitement, connecting to it and you end up grinning in the deliberate attempts of the authors digression each time.The novel is devoid of succinctness because the unfolding of a life and its mysteries lies in its details. Painstakingly, yet colorfully, the author, like the most meticulous surgeon has successfully dissected each aspect of the incident. So if there is a slimy eel involved on the scene, the author has poked into its very existence, its breeding patterns, its origination, the research behind it. If a bottle of ale is the weapon in question, then you are dragged into the inglorious history of its brewing and its makers. The river Leem, the scene of crime flows into numerous pages.The first person narrative invigorates the imagination. This is an uncomfortable quilt you would like to tuck under and not want to let go off. Am a Graham Swift fan now!
What do You think about Waterland (1996)?
The uniqueness of this novel is in its narrative voice, that of a history professor, so it has a pedantic feel to it, like a long series of lectures (as, indeed, some scenes take place in a classroom). The main action, where the narrator grew up, is a kind of place I have not actually seen, which here is called the Fens, and which in my imagination are but swamps expanded into acres upon acres. It's basically a family history spanning more than two centuries with its quirky characters, its tragedies, past glories, some sex, incest, suicide, murder, alcoholic intoxication and the usual stuff one finds when one digs up ancestral past to turn it into a novel which people will read with their mouths open in shock or surprise.I do not find it difficult to relate to this novel because the narrator, like a true professor, love to occasionally segue into interesting topics perhaps to demonstrate his expansive knowledge about things (or, to be more precise, the impressive research done by the author--the narrator in real life). Many of these interesting little sub-topics are familiar to me. Like chapter 51 which speaks of something I often wake up with every cold morning--"About Phlegm" Or mucus. Or slime. An ambiguous substance. Neither liquid nor solid: a viscous semi-fluid. Benign (lubricating, cleansing, mollifying, protective) yet disagreeable (a universal mark of disgust: to spit). It checks inflammation; retains and disperses moisture. When fire breaks out in the body (or in the soul) phlegm rushes to the scene. It tackles emergencies. When all is quiet it does maintenance work on drains and hydrants."Its soggy virtues make it inimical to inspiration or cheer. It resists the sanguine and the choleric and inclines towards melancholy. A preponderance of phlegm may produce the following marks of temperament: stolidity; sobriety; patience; level-headedness; calm. But also their counterparts: indolence; dullness; fatalism; indifference; stupor."An ambiguous humour, said to be characteristic of the insular and bronchitic English. It affects the elderly; accumulates with experience. To the sick and fevered it brings equivocal comfort. Eases yet obstructs; assists yet overwhelms. According to ancient tradition the phlegmatic or watery disposition is to be remedied by infusions of strengthening liquors. A specific in all cases (though never a permanent or predictable one): the administration of alcohol."There are also something quotable here about history, and beer, but the best--for me--is this one about phlegm.
—Joselito Honestly and Brilliantly
After Rushdie‘s “The Moor’s Last Sigh” I could only expect that another family saga will end up in my hands: "Waterland" by Graham Swift. It was my first plunge into Swift’s waters, and I hope that it won't be the last one. I only regret reading Waterland in Lithuanian instead of its original language, and I will not know until I pick up the next book by Swift if my four stars should be attributed to my not fully identifying with the author’s voice or the translator’s.Waterland is a story about storytelling, a narrative about narration that analyses the meaning and the necessity of history. “Children, only animals live entirely in the Here and Now. Only nature knows neither memory nor history. 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.”And so the protagonist of the book, Tom, a history teacher in a high school, tells us a story. About the “waterland”, the low-lying fens somewhere in east England. About drainage and beer brewing, madness and murder, coming of age, incest, abortion and childlessness. Swift suggests that history is cyclical, that any revolution for a better future is always based on a vision or an adapted reflection of a period of prosperity and wellbeing in the past. That a change leads to another change, which does not always mean progress. That there is also regression and repetition. The Fens, where the biggest part of the story is based, serve Swift as the main metaphor of this cyclicality. Despite centuries of efforts to drain and improve the land in the fens, the water had always found the way to return through rains and floods, bringing disasters to the inhabitants. Do we all live in the fens of history, I dare to ask? And is there more to it than trying to keep our heads above the water of its recurring floods?I may or I may not find the answer, but I will keep wondering. "Your "Why?" gives the answer. Your demand for explanation provides an explanation. Isn't the seeking of reasons itself inevitably an historical process, since it must always work backwards from what came after to what came before? And so long as we have this itch for explanations, must we not always carry round with us this cumbersome but precious bag of clues called history? Another definition, children: Man, the animal which demands an explanation, the animal which asks Why."
—Giedre
Sometimes it's not only the book, but when you read the book. Sometimes, you pick up the book just when it has the most relevance to you. Synchronicity. I bought this years ago, at a booksale, and only picked it up this year. It is brilliantly constructed, but that isn't my point. I suppose normally I would've found it sort of soggy and slow, but at this particular point in time I found it more than sublime. It hit me. Somehow it just dealt with everything that I was fighting with, narrative, history, the past, future. It is incisively cruel: in its portrayal of human relations, even in the unforgiving repetition that is history. It ties the personal to the political: this is another weird analogy -- hiroshima mon amour. The poignancy of 'the simple folk' of the Fens, of the sharp detailing of human curiosity, really got me. Because I am a scholar, driven by the same forces of curiosity. I know how powerful it can be. But at the same time, on a personal level, to be this much in the know -- and to have read this much about people, sex, love -- and with friends and (possible flames, past, future, present) who know that much too -- a certain innocence is denied us. It's a matter of age too. In my mid twenties -- nostalgia (this is brought up in the books) -- nostalgia as well as horror. Yes, the heart of light, the silence.
—Lorraine
