Waterland

I recently applied for a job, and part of the application was that I had to write 500 words on a book that I have recently read. I chose Waterland by Graham Swift, and here's what I wrote. It definitely isn't the best 500 words I've ever written, and in retrospect I probably shouldn't have chosen it: it's a very dense novel and I don't think I did a great job of unpicking it. I was planning to write about Outliers by Malcom Gladwell, which I also finished recently, and had a lot to say about, but I gave my copy to a friend and prefer to write these things having taken at least a cursory look through first.

Nonetheless, here is what I wrote.

First published in 1983, Waterland holds the enviable position of being both remarkably ‘of its time’ and yet sufficiently fluent, evocative and wonderful that those of this current generation still read it. It is a beautiful book: equally tragic and humorous, knowing and repressed, its multiple cadences are perfectly pitched.

Waterland is set in the East Anglian Fens, and its watery prose matches the surroundings. It is a quintessentially English novel too, with repressed characters failing to deal with the grief left by the war. Family is a major theme of the novel: not too dissimilar in style to Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Waterland is a family saga, history and tragedy in one, told with a gripping grace and urgency.

The novel begins with, and revolves around, young Tom Crick (a beautiful fairytale name). His mother has died, his father has come home, emotionally damaged by the war, and his older brother, Dick, ‘cannot read or white. He is not even good at putting together a sentence’. Tom, with his intelligence and charm, is the only member of the family able to communicate with those outside it. The family is submerged in a history it cannot escape, drowning not waving. Swift spends a good portion of the first half of the novel describing the family’s ancestors, who have always lived in this part of the world: location is an incredibly important element to the novel. The family trade of old was brewing: appropriate, then, for the Fens location, for the intoxicating richness of the prose, and bleakly satirised when a beer bottle is identified as a murder weapon. 

But, as we all must and do, Tom Crick ages. The timeframe of the novel shifts throughout between the young Tom, and, thirty years later, Tom as history teacher in a South London school, with a fragile wife. They cannot have children, which leads her to a drastic course of action: stealing an unattended baby from a supermarket. This action not only precipitates some of Tom’s anxieties on a personal level - forced retirement, marriage crises - but mirrors the larger themes of the novel. Reproduction: a wonderful chapter, both serious and eccentric, on the biology of eel reproduction provides a scintillating volta for the novel, and complements another of the novel’s major concerns, human sexuality.

The novel is unavoidably fatalistic: Swift’s question throughout is, essentially, how can we overcome our history? That’s a huge question, and while Swift may never actually answer it, he does skillfully distill it: the great crisis of ‘history’ is transformed, via the minutiae and tediums and dramas of Crick’s life, into a series of smaller, yet no less important, considerations. And this is why the book is so wonderful, and why Swift is so talented: it is impossible to read this book and come away less empathetic, less experienced or less curious about the world around us, and how that world came to be.