Review
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"Perfectly controlled, superbly written -- Waterland is
original, compelling and narration of the highest order." -- The
Guardian (U.K.)
"Swift spins a tale of empire-building, land reclamation, brewers
and sluice-minders, bewhiskered Victorian patriarchs, insane and
visionary relicts.... I can't remember when I read a book of such
strange, insidious, unsettling power with a more startling cast
of characters." -- Books and Bookmen (U.K.)
"Teems with energy, fertility, violence, madness -- demonstrates
the irrepressible, wide-ranging talent of this young British
writer." -- Washington Post Book World
"A formidably intelligent book -- animated by an impressive,
angry pity at what human creatures are capable of doing to one
another in the name of love and need.... The most powerful novel
I have read for some time." -- The New York Review of Books
"Waterland appropriates the Fens as Moby Dick did whaling or
Wuthering Heights the moors -- a beautiful, serious, and
intelligent novel, admirably ambitious and original." -- The
Observer (U.K.)
"Rich, ingenious, inspired." -- The New York Times
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From the Inside Flap
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Set in the bleak Fen Country of East Anglia, and spanning
some 240 years in the lives of its haunted narrator and his
ancestors, Waterland is a book that takes in eels and incest,
ale-making and madness, the heartless sweep of history and a
family romance as tormented as any in Greek tragedy.
"Waterland, like the Hardy novels, carries with all else a
profound knowledge of a people, a place, and their
interweaving.... Swift tells his tale with wonderful contemporary
verve and verbal felicity.... A fine and original work."--Los
Angeles Times
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About the Author
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Graham Swift is the author of six novels, including the
Booker Prize-winning Last Orders. His work has been translated
into more than twenty languages. He lives in London, England.
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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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Excerpted from the Introduction
I was sitting on the steps of a caravan. It was winter and the
sun was out. The house we had bought was still a wreck. I was a
junior editor at Penguin and Graham had given me the first sixty
or so pages of his new novel. I had worked on Graham’s second
novel Shuttlecock and we had become friends. This was his third
novel. It was to be called Waterland.
Almost at once, from the very opening, from those first few
promises of stories and ancestry and mother’s milk, I knew
instinctively that I was in the presence of something extra-
ordinary, something which, when opened fully, was going to
envelop me like a glorious burst of light, changing me and the
world I lived in forever. Reading a great book is a discovery of
its own. The reader feels an almost limitless thrill, like an
archaeologist must when stumbling upon a fabled burial site or
the lost skull of civilization. It is as if you have discovered
this treasure by yourself, and it is yours and yours alone. You
take possession of it, guard it jealously. Sure, that moment will
pass. Later you will offer up its secrets to others, allow them
to talk of it, handle it with (as far as you are concerned)
disturbing familiarity, but for those precious hours and days it
belongs to no one else, and you hug it closely, protecting every
page. That was how I felt, reading those sixty pages. That is how
everyone feels, first reading those sixty pages and beyond. It is
yours, made just for you. What is more, to some unhomable
degree, it is your story too, in more ways than you thought
possible.
Circumstances changed. By the time Graham had finished the novel,
I had moved to become editor of Picador. In those days Picador
was solely a paperback house, but happily, partly thanks to our
previous relationship, it came about that Waterland would be
published by Heinemann in hardcover and a year later in
paperback, at Picador. I would edit the novel, along with David
Godwin at Heinemann. It was a big book for me. It was a big book
for Graham. It’s a big book for everyone who reads it.
This is a personal introduction, because it seems to me that is
what Waterland is. A personal book, a book that speaks to the
innermost core of the reader, digging into the psyche, asking
questions, unearthing feelings, seeding ideas, suspicions, that
have laid dormant, as to who you are and where you came from, and
why it is that doubt, unease, a sense of unspoken, fearful
history, is always there, floating under the surface of the
waters of the unknown. In that respect there is a quality to it
reserved for the most part to the symphony, an underlying motif,
an inference, which travels through the novel almost in a
different life form, hovering above it all – a note, a call,
which lies beyond what is written, emanating from a place that is
at one and the same time familiar and utterly new. Reson- ance.
You travel through Waterland on its reverberation.
Waterland is a strange book in that, contrary to accepted wisdom,
it lies outside Swift’s usual canon. If one removed Waterland
from the body of his work and followed the progres- sion of the
other novels, they take on a very particular trajec- tory, his
(or at least one of them) concentrated on quite a specific
target, with clear markers laid out along the way, from The Sweet
Shop Owner right through to Wish You Were Here. Swift’s
overriding intent, as a writer of prose, is to reduce that prose,
the word, the sentence, down to its purest form and thereby to
unleash the latent power lying within. Swift becomes, if you
like, the novelist’s equivalent of a nuclear physicist, working
towards the day when, freed from impurities, he breaks the word
down into its seemingly lightest, most weightless form, releasing
moments of dazzling, almost limitless energy. Two instances of
this spring immediately to mind. The airport scene in The Light
of Day – a scene of almost religious intensity – and, more
recently, the moment in Wish You Were Here when Major Richards,
an army officer and the bearer of bad news, steps out of a car
and puts on his cap. That is all he does. He reaches out for his
peaked cap resting on the passenger seat, gets out of the car and
puts it on, yet in that brief action the weight of the world
billows out in shock waves. It is difficult, if not impossible to
understand quite how or why. Take the sentences apart, examine
them and the power simply slips away, but together, under Swift’s
tutelage, the intensity is (to use the word in its correct
context) awesome. You stand in awe of it. It takes your breath
away.
But if all his other novels have been fashioned by the novelist
from Los Alamos, then Waterland has been put together in a more
familiar manner, made with more familiar tools, from more
familiar elements, and in a more familiar design (albeit an
astonishing one). Waterland has the appearance of a magnificent
engine, a shining and brilliant marvel of construction. It has
its oiled wheels, its cogs, its ratchets, its levers. It breathes
power. Once be, there is no stopping Waterland; every part
sets another part in motion. It is a glorious, bravura construct,
producing story after story in a seemingly unstoppable flow.
Reading it, we are conscious of it all (Waterland like a gleaming
Flying Scotsman, perfect and polished, powering over the land),
and (in the same vein as up on that railway bank, watch- ing the
behemoth pass) we stand in wonder of Waterland’s physical
appearance, beguiled by its complexities, thrilled by the rhythm
and hum of it as the novel does its work. (Waterland does that
other steam-engine thing too – being in its presence makes us
feel good, makes us feel part of it. It uplifts.) The people –
the passengers – are similarly held in thrall to this powerhouse,
working through its influence, serving its purpose, carried by
its energy and its working parts, its locks and water- ways, its
relentless little pump houses. They, like us, are in its power.
But though we are (players and readers alike) conscious of it,
this great thing, breathing like a beast, its presence never
detracts from its intent, never diverts us from its purpose, why
it is there, its reason for delivering its stories and its people
with a memorizing fecundity, setting them down and moving them
(and us) along. We do not mind how deliberately it lies both
outside and inside of us, how its power is experienced both
internally and externally; in fact we crave it, and are tied to
this Waterland as much as those strapped within. We are all
affected, readers and passengers alike, harnessed to the wheel,
the piston, to the circumstance, to the sluice gates and the
waters as they swirl and surround us and carry us off. Here we
have it then – Swift as Brunel, brilliant inventor, master
builder, blueprint wizard, plotter and planner, a visionary, a
user of all materials, creating this Waterland, this wonder of
the age, setting his creation free to steam across Great Britain,
then continents and oceans to the wider waiting world.
Waterland. There it is. He made it for you and me. What did he
do, this hatless Isambard? What did he create exactly? What is
it, this novel? What is it?
Let us start, as the narrator might suggest, at the beginning.
Open the first page. Take a look at the blueprint. The Contents.
They will give you pause for thought.
The first two entries are 1. About the Stars and the Sluice,
followed by an oddly resonant phrase (a phrase which accidentally
transports us to an age after the book was written), 2. The End
of History. So we have three elements already in the mix. Stars -
the heavens (space, distance, time), Sluice, a mechanism for
controlling current (storing up, letting go – a novelist’s device
if ever there was one), and thirdly, The End of History, an
unsettling notion, pointing almost to the end of time itself, or
when the earth has no more need of it – when perhaps the stars
have gone out). For our third and fourth chapters we are
delivered to firmer, more habitable ground: About the Fens and
Before the Headmaster (place and character), and with upon
a following in their wake, we have the other stuff of
novels: conflict. Read on. Back and forth it goes, like, dare I
say it, a shuttlecock, the book laying its pattern down, weaving
its web: About the Story-telling Animal, About the Rise of the
Atkinsons, About Accidental Death (note the philosophical plural
there), then suddenly, De la R ́evolution, a title in French, and
later on – after Lock-keepers and Grandhers – Aux Armes (is
that not from the Marseillaise? Aux armes, citoyens! Formez vos
bataillons?) It must be, because after Coronation Ale (back to
England and English monarchs complete with heads) comes the
Fourteenth of July, again in French, Quatorze Juillet, and
following fast, the instruction, despite all that, to Forget the
Bastille. This novel, it is clear, will be playing with us,
taking us we know not where, from one place to another, dropping
us in, whipping us out, past, present, water, land, in, out, up,
down, round and round. Yes, forget the Bastille, it’s not about
that at all, it’s About the Eel, and About the Saviour of the
World, About the East Wind, Contemporary Nightmares,
Empire-building. In fact, it’s The Whole Story.
The Whole Story? Is that what it is?
Here you have an inkling, if not a , of where this novel
intends to take you. Everywhere. Waterland is history, it is
exploration. Waterland is geography, lineage. It is commerce,
decline and fall, the industrial revolution (the French one too,
with heads lopped off ) and, like everything around us, it bears
the s of the two great wars of the twentieth century. It is
family saga, family secrets, love, licit and otherwise; it is,
above all, an exploration into what it is, this history thing,
that affects us all, your history, mine, ours. It is saying that
we are all part of it, that we are, to use a current phrase, all
in it together, that I am connected to you, as you are connected
me, though we may not know the how and the when, but there’s a
link somewhere, back in time, stuck in the roots, or if not
there, floating out there, to the future. We can’t escape
it, this web, this history. We’re caught in it. We move along its
sticky lines, struggle helplessly in its grip. So where do we
begin to make sense of it? How do we begin (the storyteller’s
eternal once-upon-a-time question)?
Here then, with Waterland, we have the story as , the novel as
gene pool. Which story? His? Hers? How far back? How far forward?
Stories and histories, histories and stories, each one fighting
for supremacy, Waterland the referee, bringing some semblance of
order to the clash between them. ‘The end of History!’ Price the
teenager decls (a theory Fukuyama offered up as his own
decades later for a different reason. Price was closer to a
possible truth.) No, it’s the beginning of a story, Tom Crick,
his history teacher says, just not the story you’re expecting.
It’s not King Canute or Robespierre. It’s lock- keepers and mad
women, bargemen and brewers, attics and funerals; it’s money and
mud, silver and silt, whisky and water, and s. It’s
children, children. It’s children, what they inherit, what they
leave behind . . . the stories they tell . . .
But sense. It is possible to make sense? Isn’t the schoolboy
Price right? Haven’t we known since 1945 that nothing makes sense
anymore? Or is it just that we need help, help to see the sense,
if only we could, that unless we hear the stories, listen to
them, understand, acknowledge, there can never be any sense, that
stories are our only salvation, that we have to string them
together to see the shape they make, the shape we are in.
Marooned by the insistent voice of self, we stand by the water’s
edge, send messages out, hoping that one day someone will hear
us, that help will come. Here, our narrator, our history teacher,
our storyteller (Tom Crick, of course, sharing the same surname
as the Francis Crick who nailed the molecule in ’53.
Accident? Design?) stands at the canal’s edge and drops his
stories in one by one, hoping that his pupils, his readers, will
pick them up as they bob by. They are all one story, naturally,
all the same story, just different parts of it stuck in different
bottles, and he sends it out, hoping that by writing it down he
might make sense of it all too, hoping that help or understanding
will come to hand, hoping that he will not go mad in the telling
of it. So many things in it to cause madness. The landscape
drives people mad. Family life drives people mad. War drives
people mad. Sex too. Everything can drive people mad. Madness
even. Madness drives people mad. There they are, bottled messages
of hope and madness, held in his shaking fingertips, fermenting
in a stopper. Except of course that the first bottle, the opening
bottle as it were, is an empty one, drained of its (Coronation)
ale. The bottle is the message.
And the ale itself – the Coronation Ale – why it transforms
people. It (guess what) drives them mad. It wilds the civil
, sets the mob in it alight. Obscenities are sung, ships
run aground, breweries burn down, the whole town leaps about
possessed ... the whole town? What about the book? What about
Waterland?
Now we have it, now we know why Waterland is what it is. Surely
Swift must have drunk a fair quantity of Coronation Ale himself,
been overcome by a fierce and unstoppable energy which has him
dancing over the centuries, gathering stories like a pied piper,
having them run in his wake, jostling for attention. For it is
true that this Waterland is aflame, that some- thing has happened
to the author of The Sweetshop Owner and Shuttlecock, that he has
been seized by something, a force, a force which has risen up
from the flat lands of the fens, its water, its marshes, and
driven him to the brink of Waterland’s edges . . . Or could it be
that nothing is made up, that this is all real, from the drainage
to the railway lines and the canal structures, the fires, the
deaths, even the body floating in the water? Is that why
Waterland strikes such a chord, because it is real, isn’t fiction
at all, because Coronation Ale was simply a wonder-brew that
transported him back to . . . it’s hard to say exactly when or
where? It reads as if true, this Waterland, not simply like a
story, but more like a voice, a memory, recalling ... But true or
not, it’s the what done it ... Or if not the , perhaps
it’s the wind, the East Wind, another fabled mixer of minds,
which like so many subjects in this encyclo- paedic novel has a
chapter all of its own. The East Wind.
It seems to me that as a nation we are divided into those who
incline to the west coast and those who favour the east. The West
is warm, where the Gulf Stream runs, where the winds are wet,
where the milder climate lies, where the coast looks out onto
vast as of empty water. The East is the wind from the Urals
and the Russian steppes, cold, unforgiving. The East is the North
Sea. The West may have the heat of the sun but the East has its
light, the dawn, the dance of time, the beginning. We are a
northern race, raised by northern light and northern climes. We
are Saxons, Angles, Vikings, Normans. It is from the east that
invasion came. It is on, or over, our eastern shores that we have
won and lost our battles. Eastern land, eastern seas, invasions
and influence and history. So it was no accident (as Melville’s
Nantucket was no accident for his journey into the heart of
America) that Swift chose the Fens for his journey into the heart
of England, the eastern tip. Rid- ing in a railway carriage,
travelling over the rolling flat, he thought his mind might lay
its on this surface, that here might be a land wet enough
to spawn a book which could be host to a whole forest of tales, a
land half-real, half-concoction itself, a land made in the minds
of men, a mix of mist and matter, where his drifting tales could
be drained and chan- nelled and poured into the body of the work
... so that this Waterland, this Fen country, is now a land
teeming with untold histories, untold mysteries, a land full of
people with songs to tell of who and how they were, their hymns
ancient and modern. Forget the Sarso Sea (forget even the
Bastille), there’s enough stuff here. There is always enough
stuff here.
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