Waterland: Picador Classic

by Graham Swift

Made-up stories, true stories; soothing stories, warning stories; stories with a moral or with no point at all; believable stories and unbelievable stories; stories which were neither one thing nor the other.

From the raised banks of the Leem, it stretched away to the horizon, its uniform colour, peat-black, varied only by the crops that grew upon it – grey-green potato leaves, blue-green beet leaves, yellow-green wheat; its uniform levelness broken only by the furrowed and dead-straight lines of ditches and drains, which, depending on the state of the sky and the angle of the sun, ran like silver, copper or golden wires across the fields and which, when you stood and looked at them, made you shut one eye and fall prey to fruitless meditations on the laws of perspective.

What a sentence!

Vermuyden did not foresee one other thing. That reclaimed land shrinks – as anything must shrink that has the water squeezed out of it. And peat, above all, which absorbs water like a sponge, shrinks when it dries. The Fens are shrinking. They are still shrinking – and sinking. Land which was above sea-level in Vermuyden’s day is now below it. Tens of feet below it. There is no exaggerating the dangers.

For what is water, which seeks to make all things level, which has no taste or colour of its own, but a liquid form of Nothing?

Who will not feel in this twentieth century of ours, when even a teenage schoolboy will propose as a topic for a history lesson the End of History, the mud of Flanders sucking at his feet?

(history is a thin garment, easily punctured by a knife blade called Now).

Before you a balding quinquagenarian who gabbles about the Ancien Régime, Rousseau, Diderot and the insolvency of the French Crown;

Yet the Here and Now, which brings both joy and terror, comes but rarely – does not come even when we call it. 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.

What do you do when reality is an empty space? You can make things happen – and conjure up, with all the risks, a little token urgency; you can drink and be merry and forget what your sober mind tells you. Or, like the Cricks who out of their watery toils could always dredge up a tale or two, you can tell stories.

I began to demand of history an Explanation.

But 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. 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.

There are times (they come round really quite often) when good dry textbook history takes a plunge into the old swamps of myth and has to be retrieved with empirical fishing lines.

Isn’t this 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?

by forever attempting to explain we may come, not to an Explanation, but to a knowledge of the limits of our power to explain.

they have deepened his desire to fathom the secrets of history and aroused, moreover, a belief in education.

And where history does not undermine and set traps for itself in such an openly perverse way, it creates this insidious longing to revert. It begets this bastard but pampered child, Nostalgia. How we yearn – how you may one day yearn – to return to that time before history claimed us, before things went wrong.

the implications of that word ‘revolution’? A turning round, a completing of a cycle.

yet almost every revolution contains within it an opposite if less obvious tendency: the idea of a return. A redemption; a restoration. A reaffirmation of what is pure and fundamental against what is decadent and false.

A return to a new beginning.

this revolution, which they thought was over so quickly, is forced, in order to satisfy its insistence on first principles, to renew itself again and again, with ever more ruthless zeal, till exhaustion allows compromise – if not reaction.

You mention the hungry workers. Do these make a revolution? Or do the overtaxed bourgeoisie?

Is a revolution merely a spontaneous external event or somebody’s conscious plan?

Surely a revolution cannot be called a revolution unless before it is even an act it is the expr...

the more you try to dissect events, the more you lose hold of them – the more they seem to have occurred largely in people’s imagination .

Another definition of Man: the animal who craves meaning – but knows—

who by daring to transmute things into sound were unconsciously forging the phenomenon known as History, we can say readily: with indifference.

a river which possessed as no man did, or does, the secret capacity to move yet remain?

And that remark first put about, two and a half thousand years ago, by Heraclitus of Ephesus, that we cannot step twice into the same river, is not to be trusted. Because we are always stepping into the same river.

explaining’s a way of avoiding the facts while you pretend to get near to them

Curiosity begets love. It weds us to the world. It’s part of our perverse, madcap love for this impossible planet we inhabit.

There are myths of progress, myths of decline. And dreams of revolution

the historian’s besetting sin: he ponders contingencies, he’s no good at action.)

Have you ever turned a corner to where Now and Long Ago are the same and time seems to be going on in some other place?

the death of three people

while Waterland has its several plots and a pervasive story-telling urge, it often shifts into something not like narrative at all – the chapter ‘About the Eel’ is the example people tend to pick out. I felt confident about these seeming digressions, that they wouldn’t be digressions but vital parts of an organic, if idiosyncratic and complex, whole.

one begins with the ordinary, mundane, even disappointing world we all know and looks for the extraordinary in it.

long before I ever thought of setting a novel there, I’d seen the Fens, if only from a train window, and a mere sight can leave a haunting impression,

I may actively have been looking for a setting that was as unobtrusive as possible. The Fens may have seemed to me the ideal non-setting, the ideal flat, bare platform for my human drama. Little did I know.

the apparent background became a foreground, even a kind of principal character.

Waterland, in short, would teach me never again to regard location as a mere incidental feature of fiction.

Of history too

It has perhaps become more baffling. Whether as an academic discipline or as material for bizarre televisual guided tours, we seem to know less and less what to do with it. Is it a toy, a tool or just an embarrassing encumbrance?

To put it another way, Waterland is set where we’re all set, inside our own heads.