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Waterland

Graham Swift

Paperback | Pages: 368 pages

Rating: 3.92 | 7309 Users | 556 Reviews

Details Based On Books Waterland

Title	:	Waterland
Author	:	Graham Swift
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	Deluxe Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 368 pages
Published	:	December 4th 1997 by MacMillan (first published 1983)
Categories	:	Fiction. Historical. Historical Fiction. European Literature. British Literature. Literary Fiction

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Waterland, published in 1983, is a semi-postmodern examination of the end of History, the trajectory of the promise of the Enlightenment. It is set in the 80's, but looks backwards through history, centering around 1943. It has three different plots: in the 40's, when the narrator Tom is a teenager, it tells of the death of another teenage boy and of the consequences of fooling around with curious Catholic schoolgirls (it sort of screams "DON'T HAVE PREMARITAL SEX! PREMARITAL SEX HAS HORRIBLE PHYSICAL, EMOTIONAL, AND SUPERNATURAL CONSEQUENCES!"); Tom as an adult, and his wife's mental collapse and crime, and Tom's subsequent forced retirement from the school where he is a history teacher; and the history of his family, beginning centuries ago.

Between the two branches of his family, there's a great deal of playing with Freud's concepts of melancholia and mourning - melancholia, the inability to let go of something and move on, being stuck in the past, refusing to move forward with the future, leading to your eventual demise; and mourning being the state of moving on, of grieving and then getting over it. Tom's family has one branch on each side. And then it goes into History versus history (the big overarching world History, versus your own history, and how much you're ever a part of History), and the collapse of linear time, and the fact that although Time, God, and H(h)istory are possibly arbitrary and fictional, we still need them.

Then the incest starts.

Also some philosophizing about eels.

I'm not kidding. This book gets a little ridiculous. It's a semi-Postmodern text examining the difficulty of writing Realism in a Postmodern era, but it goes off on romantic (not Romantic) tangents about natural history and cultural history and all, in a very Julian Barnes (A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters) way. Then it goes into creepy, Stephen King-esque scenes with the children exploring the two great draws in life: sex and death. (The only constants, heh.) I ended up wishing either Stephen King or Julian Barnes had written it, and focused on it - as it is, the tension is uneasy, and yet uneasy in a way that really contributes to the novel and its aims. Although I do love how the idea of storytelling is played with in this novel: the idea that we can't bear reality without the stories we create to endow it with meaning, because otherwise reality is too strong, too harsh, and will overpower us. But again, that's very Barnes.

There is a beautiful passage, though, which I'll include here:

Once upon a time people believed in the end of the world. Look in the old books: see how many times and on how many pretexts the end of the world has been prophesied and foreseen, calculated and imagined. But that, of course, was superstition. The world grew up. It didn't end. People threw off superstition as they threw off their parents. They said, Don't believe that old mumbo-jumbo. You can change the world, you can make it better. The heavens won't fall. it was true. For a little while - it didn't start so long ago, only a few generations ago - the world went through its revolutionary, progressive phase, and the world believed it would never end, it would go on getting better. But then the end of the world came back again, not as an idea or a belief but as something the world had fashioned for itself all the time it was growing up.

Which only goes to show that if the end of the world didn't exist it would be necessary to invent it.

Identify Books In Pursuance Of Waterland

Original Title:	Waterland
ISBN:	0330336320 (ISBN13: 9780330336321)
Edition Language:	English
Literary Awards:	Booker Prize Nominee (1983), Guardian Fiction Award (1983), Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize (1983), Premio Grinzane Cavour for Narrativa Straniera (1987)

Rating Based On Books Waterland

Ratings: 3.92 From 7309 Users | 556 Reviews

Crit Based On Books Waterland

I found this novel extraordinary; it achieves so much simultaneously. It has a complex structure of great virtuosity. It tackles big historical and existential issues but still grounds itself in intimate characterisation. Its stylistically clever but the cleverness never compromises or precludes emotional depth. I loved it.

If I could only have five books with me on a desert island, this would be one of them. It's got everything--madness, arson, alemaking, incest, the claiming of land by technology and its reclamation by the sea, and the French Revolution. Plus a lyrical, fairytale-like tone. No other book I've read explores the relationship between geography and the history of a people better than this one. What more could you want? Swift was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for this novel and won it for Last

UPDATE:I thought I'd revisit this one, as I do often for books I rate 5 stars. Does that rating hold? In this case, no. It took me a long time to get through a second reading, and it just didn't cast a spell like it did the first time. It's still VERY good, but for me, 2 years have passed and I can't sing praises as loudly as before. Maybe it's just me, maybe it's the 2 years, maybe at the time I read it there had been an issue (emotional?, physical?) this book addressed. I reread my original

Like the countryside in which it is set, I recall this book as being grey, depressing, and sodden. I can't recall a thing that I learned from it - all I remember is the enormous sense of relief I had once I managed to finish it.Though, as the blurb helpfully point out, there are eels and incest.

This may be one of the most beautifully written books I've ever read. A lot of my favorite books, some of which I enjoyed even more than this one, have some combination of good plots, good themes, or good characters, but the quality of the writing leaves something to be desired. This is one of those novels that is so expertly crafted that it makes you remember what great writing is. The premise of a history teacher who is about to involuntarily retire due to the principal's decision to eliminate

The Tide of HistoryGraham Swift won the Booker Prize in 1996 for Last Orders, the story of a group of East-End Londoners on a trip to dispose of a dead friend's ashes, and looking back at the mingled histories of their relationships going back decades. Swift's earlier novel Waterland (1983) is also preoccupied with the past, but it is a much easier book to read, with fewer characters and a more articulate narrator. This is Tom Crick, a South London history teacher who is about to be retired,

Excellent and atmospheric novel conjuring up a strong sense of time and place (both the Fens with its waterways, mud and eels such that the Fens becomes one of the characters in the story) and the late cold war feeling of an end to progress and a possibility of Armageddon which informs the attitude of the children (especially their spokesperson Price) to history. The clear theme of the book is history and the interplay between natural history (the book contains a particularly detailed and