Water and History Everywhere!
There have been exactly two books I’ve read in my life that have made me decide to stop writing for good, knowing full well I could never achieve the mastery of their respective novelists. Before you go and ostracize me for indolence or lack of perseverance, know that the feeling of discomfiture is always temporary. In fact, on both occasions after a few hours wallowing in my self-pity and doubt, I was determined to get back on the warhorse and ride that Equus ferus into the combat that is writing.
The first novel that elicited defeat within me was Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground. I was eighteen when I first came across the little book, so you could possibly blame youth on my resolve to give up. But the second time I felt the sense of vanquishment was no longer than a few months ago, when I finished Graham Swift’s brilliant novel, Waterland.
Set in the bleak, drab, musty, and aqueous Fen land of East Anglia, Waterland is the profound story of a family marked by tragedy, incest, madness, torment, 240 years of ale-making, and generations of excruciating, pumping manual labor of land reclamation. It’s a big, beautiful endeavor and Swift delivers brilliantly.
This novel screams with energy, fertility, violence, madness, and a profound knowledge of history and drama. Graham Swift slowly unravels the plot of this masterful work much in the vein of Thomas Hardy, but with a wonderful, contemporary verbal felicity and ardor.
There are unbearable scenes in this book — unendurable both for their honest, horrific imagery, but also for the complete mastery with which they’re unfurled for us readers by Swift — little bits at a time, not too slowly, not too quickly. But oh so goddamn eloquently! In particular, there is a long scene dealing with an illegal home abortion performed on one of the characters, which will leave you breathless for the consummate language with which it’s written. The intensity and dynamic of this particular scene is reminiscent of the tableau Hemingway gives us in For Whom the Bell Tolls, in which Fascists and fascist sympathizers are being run through a gauntlet of armed Republicans, and thrown over a cliff. To say it’s acute and agonizing would be watering down the tension. I found myself reading Swift’s passage with jaw fully clenched, at times grinding my teeth. Yeah, this book will make you get that much into it.
If you’re a writer, you’ll think about giving up your craft after reading Swift’s Waterland. But only briefly. This kind of book will ultimately energize you, and fill you with the hunger to continue weaving your own stories. If you’re a reader, a lover of history, humanity, and getting lost in earthy, realistic narratives, you’ll not want to finish this book. You’ll want to dole it out to yourself in increments, maybe daily . . . maybe weekly.
Graham Swift went on to win the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1996 for his novel Last Orders. It is a wonderful book, worthy of the prize indeed, and a great little film as well with Michael Caine, Helen Mirren, and Bob Hoskins among others. It’s recommended at the bottom of this page. But Swift’s career-defining work (at least so far) is his stellar Waterland. Please read this amazing novel and rejoice at the beauty of storytelling; and at the beauty of our language.
