Graham 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, under the guise of phasing out history in the school, but really for personal reasons that will become apparent. The novel is ostensibly the final history classes that Tom delivers to his students -- but it is a loose structure, full of fascinating digressions. Tom's official subject is the French Revolution, but he spends more time on the story of his family and the history and geography of his birthplace, the fens of East Anglia. In particular, he focuses on one particular year, 1943, a summer of growth and exploration, when teenage sexual encounters led to more than the usual consequences.

Comments on the cover of the paperback edition compare Swift to Melville and Hardy. Both comparisons are just, although Swift's style is his own. Certainly his willingness to suspend the story for long accounts of the draining of the fens, or the rise of the brewing industry, or the breeding habits of the European Eel must owe something to MOBY DICK; I can't claim that all his discursions feed back into the story (relatively simple as it is), but they do give great richness to its context. And Swift is like Hardy in his extraordinary ability to root his writing in a detailed and intimate sense of place -- in this case at the opposite side of England, in the bleak marshlands won with difficulty from the sea. This has personal relevance for me, as my own ancestors were among those who came over to England from Holland in the 17th century to help drain the fens. What I know of the area today fits exactly with what Swift describes, but his details of banks and backwaters and feel for the spirit of living year-round amid such expanses reveal a writer who has the fenland in the marrow of his bones.

There are secrets that emerge from all this excavation, but few surprises. Swift has a way of touching on something, leaving it, and returning much later by a different route. As a result, almost everything that happens has a tragic inevitability. It is here that Tom's preoccupation with history and Swift's feeling for the fenland come full circle. Tides ebb and flow; reclaimed land is lost to silt and water and painfully regained once more; history is a slow cycle that turns continually around the same old mistakes. Swift may take a pessimistic view, but no more than, say, Ian McEwan, whom he resembles in many of his themes (cf. THE CHILD IN TIME) and in the resilient life he gives to his characters. Even Tom Crick, who understands the long view better than anybody, goes into forced retirement with his head held high.

This is the book that made Graham Swift, and deservedly so.
Swift brilliantly evokes the East Anglian fen district where the bulk of the novel is set, and critics are right in saying he rivals Hardy's Wessex and Dicken's London in his achievement.
The story is told in first person narrative where an incident in the present (baby snatching by the narrators wife) evokes memories of an incident in the past ( narrators imbecile brother involved in the death of a boy)
'Waterland' truly absorbs and is Swifts finest work by far. The one niggle I have with him is that he only ever employs the one plot line (ie incident in present evoking incident in past) and he always writes using first person narrative. I've enjoyed all the novels of his I've read (Last Orders, Light of Day Shuttlecock) but the plot line has run very thin.
But if you read only one Swift novel, make it this one.

This seems to be a truly loved, highly regarded novel. I'll admit that I'm in the minority, and am probably wrong about this book, but I didn't like it. I found myself skipping pages at a time. What others loved about the language, I found self-indulgent and ponderous. Characters were not well-fleshed. I found the plot to be trivial and implausible.

Reading Waterland was much like watching a Seinfeld episode. Not because the story is comedic. Quite to the contrary, it is tragic in every sense of the word. But like the Seinfeld writers, Graham Swift does a masterful job of weaving together multiple narrative threads as the story progresses to its ultimate conclusion. The fact that Swift is able to accomplish this feat with such beautiful prose just makes the book even more worthwhile.

Notwithstanding the foregoing, a word of caution is probably in order. For those of you who like a more simple and linear storyline as well as constant action, this book is probably not for you. Moreover, if switches in tense tend to annoy you, then portions of this book will annoy you since periodically, Swift switches from first person to third person and then back again. Personally, that, along with the complicated storyline, made the book a unique and intriguing read, but I imagine it might prove frustrating to others.

As for criticism, I have very little, but as at least one other reviewer has pointed out, some of the characters (including the protagonist) were flat and could have been more fully developed. In the grand scheme of things, however, a minor criticism really.

All in all, an outstanding read. Highly recommended.

Graham Swift's much praised novel about the natural and social history of East Anglia is beautifully constructed, and manages to sustain a great deal of suspense from chapter to chapter among many divergent plotlines, all the while imparting quite a bit of information about the amazing landscape of the Eastern fen-country. Unfortunately, it is not simply the countryside that is so astonishingly flat here. Despite his gifts as a taleteller, Swift here is not much one for fleshing out his characters, most of whom we've seen before: the most egregious example is the key character of the narrator's mentally challenged brother, who so typifies the Holy Fool that his biological father even refers to him before his birth as a messiah figure. The language is not so stylish as you'd like; the conventions of taletelling often get in the way. And the novel seems far too derivative, especially of Salman Rushdie's MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN (in terms of some of the more general points of style and approach) and Sylvia Townsend Warner's THE FLINT ANCHOR (for subject matter). This is not a bad book, by any means; but others have done this before, and have done it better.