Waterland by Graham Swift – A book review

Claim to fame : Graham Swift (born 4 May 1949) is an English writer born in London, England. His book 'Last Orders' is the 1996 winner of the Man Booker Prize. His book 'Shuttlecock' is the winner of the 1983 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize

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, unrevealing 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 storytelling invigorates the imagination. This is an uncomfortable quilt you would like to tuck under and not want to let go off.

My rating : * * * * * * * * * * - 10/10

Graham Swift