Waterland

After leafy Surrey, we travel to the Fens, for something far more grittier, and full of silt: Graham Swift's Waterland. this novel is the winner of many prizes, but I'm not sure whether I will enjoy navigating it. However, I am curious to experience his story-telling, and as Swift himself says:"Nothing is worse than when curiosity stops."

Swift's narrator, Tom Crick, about to be forced into early retirement from his post as a History teacher, drop kicks the syllabus into touch, and instead, regales his class with his own local history. In particular, he enters a game of wits, and verbal sparring with the class anarchist, Price. At times it is hard to work out whether his pupils are actually before him, or whether they are a figment of his imagination.  Dreams, visions, superstition and madness are themes which run through the book, like eels running down a river to the sea. In fact, the whole epic sweep of the story is running through the Fens to the Wash.

Tom has been an educator since his youth, undertaking to teach his older brother Dick how to read and write, when their parents had given up on his schooling. Whilst Tom is clever and academic, Dick is a lumbering hulk, slow at learning, but good at practical, hard labour.

As the adult Tom unravels the story of his life, interspersed with snippets from revolutionary France, History becomes very much HIS story. The author is continually posing the question: "What exactly is history?", and blurring the edges between recorded events and reality. Everyone has their story, for Man is "a story-telling animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting marker-buoys and trail-signs of stories."

Events in the past, have a tragic impact on the future, and mistakes of youth turn out to haunt the perpetrators for the rest of their lives, for "History is a thin garment, easily punctured by a knife blade called Now."

I reached the end of the story, when all the tales had been told, and felt that I had read a great novel, which had connected me to the landscape of the Fens, and the lives of the Fenlanders. It does what all great literature does: it makes the reader feel more alive, and to appreciate how incredibly fragile is our grip on life and sanity.