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Waterland
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Waterland by Graham Swift
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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 means
Atavism: 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 force
CLOSING LINE:
On the bank in the thickening dusk, in the will-o’ the wisp dusk, abandoned but vigilant, a motorcycle.
RATING: very good
I read this when I was about 15 or 16 and remembered it primarily as not being particularly complimentary about people from Norfolk, and also for a great sense of place. On a re-read I think it has one of the best senses of place I have ever read. The water, the fight against water, and how vital changes to waterways are to history is a key theme of this work, which is the story of a school teacher on the brink of forced retirement, telling us the history of his childhood and the local town and its leading family the Atkinsons.
There is a chapter about eels about it and if a book can get me interested in reading about them (urgh, horrible things) then it deserves 5 stars.
Tom Crick is a history teacher who is being pushed out of his job by a ‘progressive’ headmaster. From the outset we are aware that a personal tragedy is involved, but Swift moves backwards and forwards in time for Crick to reveal the roots of this event and how it relates to his family history and even the history of the Fens.I loved this book for its sense of place and its exploration of history, especially how it puts individual family history into the context of wider events so the large and small combine together, and how this links with myth and story telling.
The descriptions of the Fens are mesmerising with the reclaimed land, the dirty water and the fog and wind, even the eels are memorable and have their part to play. Swift’s individual writing style works really well for this kind of book and makes it a powerful and moving story.
I also found this book to be very well written and quite a unique balance of family history and trauma's running parallel to the natural disasters and historical traumas of the day. I found the way the author wove the Crick and Atkinson's family history in with the history of the land and water that they occupied to be wonderful. I got a bit tired of our narrator's preaching to his students but as he began to break down and tell them the story of his family it became quite engaging. The place and nature of women in this novel plays an interesting part. Our author gives them roles but we learn less about their interior lives than we do of the male characters. Sarah Atkinson is a victim and potentially a supernatural instigator of revenge. Helen participates in incest. Mary gets an abortion at a time when that could well have killed her and the baby although she was naive and perhaps didn't understand exactly what she was undertaking. Our narrator, Tom, does not really understand women except that they leave; his mother's "going" and his wife's leaving by virtue of losing her grasp on reality. Overall, I really appreciated the writing about the common man's life and the nature of the fens.
5 stars: loved this one. Agree with others here that the sense of place and a people having enduring commonalities and character throughout history is a great read on the recurring nature of history: but also the uniqueness of it where geography influences the civilizations it contains. The fenlands themselves become almost a living record of its people. The eel trade continues on while great events like the Napoleonic wars and the world wars happen elsewhere: but they are also present in the people who come back with PTSD, in the way that the eel and brewery trades are affected by larger events. The local intrigues contain all of the elements of what constitutes 'grander history' of myth and folklore coming from real events, family intrigues and murder, political machinations (such as Crick being pushed out of his job for reforming the institution) and the rise and fall of certain trade endeavors (trying to make the fens drained and arable in places, the brewery, the eels) . It is a great thesis on how every epic moment in history still contains people living their normal domestic lives, and the epic-ness of history is within these 'small' lives as well.
Incredible book.
Mod
****
Tom Crick, a high school history teacher, is being pushed into retirement, as his wife, Mary, goes nuts and kidnaps a baby in a nearby Safeways. But it is through their respective family's and the Fens' history that we can get a better understanding of why Tom and Mary's story got to where they are. Swift's writing is in some way reminiscent of Patrick Suskind's Perfume (compare, for example, the debauchery induced by the Coronation Ale to the orgy caused by the release of Grenouille's perfect perfume). Even though some passages might feel slow, just a slow river full of silt, this remains a very entertaining read. And, oh, I would love to put my hands on an Atkinson India Pale Ale or just have a sip of that Coronation Ale...
Mod
This book is included in the 1001 books you must read before you die list and deservedly so as it is a well written book. My response to the book was much like a roller coaster, some ups, some downs. The slow parts for me were the descriptions of the Fens and the eels, a whole chapter on eels! I enjoyed the rich family history spanning some 300 years. I would say the family secrets were on the dark side. As a side note, before reading this book I watched the movie trailer in which Jeremy Irons plays the title role of Tom Crick. Jeremy Irons voice was in my head while reading the book which worked for me.
Read: November 2016
This book relates the saga of history professor Tom Crick's family. The family's history explains much of the current situation of Tom and his wife's lives. Parts of the book did make me more than a bit uncomfortable, but I feel that these parts were central to the story and not merely gratuitous additions. As a bonus, I learned a lot about eels and the English Fens. This is my first book by Swift, and I look forward to reading more by him.