Anyone who has read Swift knows how much the man just really digs time and how the passing of it changes us and our experiences. Though all of Swift’s novels follow this idea, Waterland goes one step further and tells the history of a land, particularly the marshy Fenlands where Swift sets his tale of broken families, buried secrets and betrayal.
Tom Crick, our narrator, is a disillusioned history teacher. Knowing he’s about to be shoved out of his role, he uses his lessons to teach his students more about his personal history which is arguably far more engaging than the French Revolution prescribed by the curriculum.
In true Swift form, this is a shattered mosaic of a novel with a flagrant disregard of chronology. We know Crick has been haunted by the events of his adolescence and we know his wife hasn’t been the same since their early days but we don’t understand the full reason behind this until the closing sentences of the novel.
The joy of Swift is the way he leads us towards the truth in his unique, serpentine style. Like the eel which forms a powerful motif in Waterland, this novel is a slippery, sinuous work. Swift, however, is always fully in control of it. From each placed hyphen to the frequent parenthetically added comments, Swift delivers a darkly comic narrative that is nothing short of a masterpiece.
Family lore blends with historical mythology in this novel and Swift peppers in some zoological sequences if only to prove that he’s the calibre of novelist that can. As such, he brings several generations and a whole region to life — you can feel the saturated soil beneath your feet as you tread through this immense work.
Though I feel bold comparing this to Moby Dick (a book I’ve never actually been able to finish), there is something of Melville in this work: a grand novel populated with an immense cast of characters, each crafted in a way that makes them impossible to forget. Waterland showcases Swift at his most ambitious, his most daring. It is an astounding novel from one of the most talented British authors.
5/5
