Waterland – Graham Swift
Found in the Official Bookcrossing Zone at Julian Graves, Royal Arcade, Norwich, on January 28 2004
This was a truly inspirational find. I’d not really come across Graham Swift before, but will certainly seek out more of his work. It’s an odd mixture of fictional autobiography, murder mystery, local history and natural history in a part of the world that we are tangentially familiar with. It raises questions about the nature of history and of the authorial voice – the whole story is an attempt by one man to explain and perhaps justify pivotal events from his own past. We have only his account, which he presents as meticulously-researched history. But, like Nelly Dean in Wuthering Heights, to what extent can we believe his account both of events and of his own motivations?
It is a gripping story enclosed within an impressive examination of what it means to tell a story and the various elements of various stories, including that of the narrator, the European eel, a fenland family and the twentieth century itself, are taken apart and rewoven as more of the sum of their parts.
There are elements that are not for the squeamish, but they are not so pronounced that they spoil the book. The crucial fact about it is that, for all its delving into byways, and pedagogical examinations of various subjects, and narrative experimentation, it has a cracking good story at its heart and the action continues unresolved until the last sentence of the last page.
I discovered after I’d finished it that it had been nominated for the Booker Prize.