Rating: 
Summary: Couldn't get into it.
Review: A Graham Swift critic once wrote that his novels are poetry in prose. Read Waterland and you will see what she meant. I have read it ten times at least and I still peruse it whenever I feel the need for a really good story (in fact it intertwines several narrative strands) rendered in lanuage that is both musical and precise. If you enjoy serious modern literature and are not afraid of postmodern challenge, this novel is for you. Enjoy it!
Rating: 
Summary: An honest fairy-tale. Brilliantly devestating.
Review: As Graham Swift begins the weaving of his tale of Tom Crick's exploration of his life and history by talking to his class of teenage boys, it is impossible to even begin to imagine what path the story is going to take. "Waterland" starts it's history by mentioning "fairy-tale words; fairy-tale advice. But we lived in a fairy-tale place" (1). Instantenously, the reader realizes the submergence into a mix of fantasy and reality in the history of Crick's development. Crick tries to explain to his students the history of the Fen country but his confussing approach leaves bits and pieces missing until the last third of the novel. Crick's own desire to share with his students the story of "magic" ale, the exploration of what love is, the search for reason, and natural history is spawned by his teaching position and the department of history being removed. Similar to streams that flow into a greater body of water, Crick connects pieces of history, personal, world, and natural, into one blend.
Crick experiences loss on every level, the loss of a child, the loss of his wife's sanity, the loss of his family, and the loss of his own innocence and idealism. Crick is essentially drowned by inability to justify the incidents which he had witnessed. Perhaps the reason he is a history teacher is the chance for him to claim some sense of objectivity over the past, if he can not do so in his personal life. A history teacher is "someone who teaches mistakes" (235). Crick is able to show others' mistakes in his 30 years of teaching, but when his job is lost there is no reason to continue to try and hide the strangeness of how he reached where he is.
The reoccuring theme of Natural history binds the entire novel together. From the mating habits of eels to the development of human sexuality, "Waterland" addresses the fact that things occur in nature that can not be fully understood. A father has fallen in love with his daughter and acted upon it; that may be a part of history but how is it defined as natural "because when fathers love daughters and daughters love fathers it's like tying up into a knot the thread that runs into the future, it's like a stream wanting to flow backwards" (228). Death occurs regardless of what is done to try and stop it, that is natural. But in Crick's history, murder is prevelant as well and he can not justify that as natural. Crick can not justify either the development of his brother. Nothing that should be natural is natural in the life of Crick.
Swift presents Crick's tale of attempting to explain history in an entrancing form worthy of being defined a fairy-tale. In an attempt to escape the past people become consumed with the need to try and explain the lives of others. Crick serves as the proof that there is only so long that a person can hide from his past. The novel may appear to start densely and slowly, but as the progression through the story takes place and pieces fit together, the movement is quickened and similar to a river after a long rain. The pouring of information and the honest of the tale allows for the connections and development of self. This is an incredible story of learning to embrace the history of self and recognize it's connection to the natural history of the entire world. Swift's novel is one of escape and finding what the fairy tale is in one's own life.
Rating:
Summary: BRILLIANT, MOVING, SAD
Review: Graham Swift is a great talent. Waterland is a wonderful novel. The narrator is Tom Crick who lived in the Fens in the 1930s and 1940s and is narrating the story from London in the 1970s. He is a history teacher. The Fens is a low lying area of Eastern England where water is both a blessing and a curse. The pregnancy of Tom's girlfriend is the central event of the book. Paternity, rage, guilt, abortion and permanent damage to Mary Metcalf are themes in the 1930s portion of the book. Flashbacks to the history of Tom's family in the nineteenth century reflect on the themes of time, loss and history. Maintaining coherence through the three time frames-1800s, the 1930-40s part, and the 1970s perspective- is the technical challenge that Mr. Swift manages very well through vital characters and brilliant prose. The book is funny, very sad, and evocative of a portion of England that is beautiful and dramatic in itself.
Rating:
Summary: Love Creates History
Review: Graham Swift's revolutionary novel "Waterland," cycles in and out of the past and present, natural history and human history, to illustrate that "history does repeat itself," in the name of love. This insightful novel reveals the vulnerability a teacher through his history lessons, in which he intertwines personal history with that of the world. The teacher shows that his own future was decided in the past, and it is through returning to the past that he might be able to move into the future. Swift uses the imagery of earth, water, wind, and fire to show that the natural elements of the world, the natural shifting of silt or mating habits of eels, are just as natural as the actions of humans. It is a cycle that is both captivating and revolting, but most importantly unavoidable.
Tom Crick, the history teacher, is a man that constantly questions the world in his eagerness to understand how things come to be. He is infatuated with history because it is a part of him that has already been determined. History cannot be changed, it cannot be denied, but it can determine your life. Because of a past he cannot escape, his wife does the unthinkable, she steals a baby in a supermarket. This action, which is the end of Crick's career as a history teacher, forces him, as if he were somehow destined, to teach the most valuable life lessons to his students. Ironically enough, it will bring him closer to a student who he will eventually call "son." In a slow unfolding of details, Crick reveals a star-crossed past, in which love and passion have both burned and drowned, leaving the reader with a complete understanding of "why."
What is history? This novel suggests that history is love. It is love that causes Thomas Atkinson to become violently jealous of his wife Sarah, pushing him to cause her the injury that will make her the mythical saint of a town. Love creates babies, it causes a father to fall in love with his daughter and produce an offspring, who coincidentally is capable of only one thing: love. Tom and Mary love each other and create a baby that must be aborted. That, in turn, prevents them from having another child. Love is unavoidable; it stirs revolutions, it burns in the hearts of lovers, and it blows like the wind, affecting everything in its path. It creates history.
The novel thrives on curiosity. Swift carefully constructs curious characters and reveals small sections of past and present to create mystery and suspense. Tom Crick relays his own coming-of-age story that captivates his students. He shows how his curiosity brought both love and fear. As a boy, Tom learns that sometimes uncovering the truth means facing a piece of history that may threaten the future. His tale is both enjoyable yet disgusting in its innocence and relevance to true life. The curiosity of the young brings both pleasure and pain, but most importantly truth and answers.
Swift brings nature and man together by linking rain and fire to the actions of men. In a beautifully constructed scene, he brings rain to a town just as their beloved, saintly Sarah dies. By doing so he creates the impression that death is as natural as rain. Like the weather, things change, but basically stay the same.
This book mimics a history textbook in that the beginning is slow and seemingly uneventful, but as time presses on, each event is linked to the last in a both unsuspecting, yet predictable pattern. "Waterland" will capture the curious reader who needs to understand why things happen. Swift writes a complete history, skillfully linking fictional and factual in a mesmerizing tale with valuable lessons in love and fear.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant, fascinating contemporary novel
Review: Graham Swift's WATERLAND is a brilliant, fascinating contemp novel that juxtaposes the dilemma of an about-to-be retrenched history teacher whose wife has just kidnapped a baby with the story of their youth, the history of their own families and community and the English fen country, as well as the natural history of the fens before historic record. This is a serious, well- and cleverly written novel that concerns eels, beer, madness, abortion, fire, flood, and ghosts. The novel combines genres and invented a new one: the "new historical novel," among whose other practitioners are Kazuo Ishiguro, Peter Ackroyd, A. S. Byatt, and Penelope Lively. WATERLAND is fascinating in plotting and character development, and SHOULD have won the Booker Prize that Swift belatedly received for his new novel LAST ORDERS (which is equally excellent, in quite different ways). This novel is essential reading for anyone interested in modern (and postmodern) fiction
Rating:
Summary: A new kind of "history" lesson...
Review: History is more than the mere retelling of facts and occurrences. History is about people. It is about raw feelings and experiences, emotions and reactions. History defines the human cycle of events, that is the constant re-invention of ideas, ideals and results. It matters not whether we have learned from the past, for we are constantly doomed to repeat its consequences anyway. After reading "Waterland," I am inclined to believe that author Graham Swift agrees with this notion. The novel, which vibrantly paints the portrait of an emotionally tortured family's history, deals head-on with the subject of history. Swift immediately questions the legitimacy of history. The mere title, "Waterland," is a contradiction in itself that begs questioning. The title suggests the murky, unstable format which the novel follows. Swift divides the novel into 52 separate chapters, each seemingly unrelated to each other on the surface, but eventually drawn to a common understanding by the intermingling of history's events in different time periods. Immediately, Swift establishes the struggle to make sense of history (the battle of understanding between fairy tale and reality) and exposes the absurdity of the repetitious human cycle. Indeed, this is a novel that wastes no time finding the earthy core of its inner-meaning (the organic fundamentals of "natural" history, i.e. "accidental" happenings caused by nature). Fittingly, the tale is told from the perspective of an aging, soon-to-be dispatched London history teacher lecturing his students for the final time. For Tom Crick, the story deals with the "end" of history, both literally and figuratively. Crick's final lesson does not pertain to the French Revolution or the great world wars, but to a fanatical storytelling about the Fenland, a marshy, isolated area nestled somewhere in Eastern England. This "fairy tale" land, where Crick spent his youth, serves as the backdrop to the telling of the schoolteacher's family history (over the past 240 years). But at the basis of this dramatic retelling is the current situation that engrosses Tom Crick: the longtime teacher is about to be canned as a result of a controversy involving his wife (who is guilty of child theft). Through Swift's brilliant (and well-placed) usage of flashback and foreshadowing, the reader learns how this unfortunate incident was in the making for nearly three centuries. The emotional history of the Crick/ Atkinson family tree shows that Tom Crick's problems are the direct result of past incidents of long ago. We learn that the wheels of fate began turning generations ago. The tale is intriguing, fast-paced and thought provoking. Swift effortlessly and effectively intertwines not only the different time periods he recounts, but the seemingly unrelated (at least, on the surface) lives of those who lived generations apart. After a short while, the lives and personalities of an 18th Century brewmaster, a World War I veteran and a contemporary school teacher seem much more alike than different. Every aspect of this human cycle - tragic death, jealousy, mental instability, curiosity, sexuality and (especially) love - is visited and revisited several times over throughout the family's history. The human cycle, as Swift subtly points out, is a never-ending machine that breaks down the generation barriers of those who call the "Fens" home. "Waterland" is nothing short of a masterpiece. To see these very obscure puzzle pieces fitting into place by the novel's three-quarter point is a wonder of fiction. Through the fabricative lectures of Tom Crick, the reader sees how Swift's grasp of and take on history is a fresh alternative to the one-dimensional history books most contemporary students are accustomed to. Swift is bold enough to point out that history is more than simply "what happened." As he explains through the story of Tom Crick, history is much more abstract. History is peaked by the curiosity of human nature, that which gives birth to an endless repetition of events and/ or happenings (the human cycle). As Swift defines it, history will never die as long as the individual continues to seek answers to his or her questions about life. Any work that makes an individual stop and rethink the basis of an institutional constant, such as our "accepted" notion of history, is invaluable. "Waterland," however, goes above and beyond the call of duty in that respect.
Rating:
Summary: For what purpose history?
Review: I should preface this review by mentioning that I first read the book as one of the requirements of an historiography course in graduate school. As a result, while I have reread the book on numerous occasions since and, while it remained my favorite book until I read "The Wind-up Bird Chronicle" by Haruki Murakami, I come at my reading of the book from that historian's slant. Also, while I love the book, I don't "like" the characters, if this makes sense.As noted by other reviewers, Tom Crick tells the tragic story of his family to the captive audience of his high school history class in the days before he is forced out of his teaching position. A troubling aspect of this, though, that I have not seen mentioned in other reviews is that way in which Tom USES the history of his family to, in a way, explain away the recent events that have brought him and his wife to their current place in time. Swift is able to make us feel sympathy for this character all the while that the character is using the trials and tribulations of his family to explain the reasons that "it's not his fault". Shouldn't we feel sympathy for the students who must listen to Tom interpret the events of the past 300 years in a way that absolves himself of responsibility for the faults in his life and marriage? Thinking about this actually makes me want to read the book once more.....
Rating:
Summary: For what purpose history?
Review: I should preface this review by mentioning that I first read the book as one of the requirements of an historiography course in graduate school. As a result, while I have reread the book on numerous occasions since and, while it remained my favorite book until I read "The Wind-up Bird Chronicle" by Haruki Murakami, I come at my reading of the book from that historian's slant. Also, while I love the book, I don't "like" the characters, if this makes sense. As noted by other reviewers, Tom Crick tells the tragic story of his family to the captive audience of his high school history class in the days before he is forced out of his teaching position. A troubling aspect of this, though, that I have not seen mentioned in other reviews is that way in which Tom USES the history of his family to, in a way, explain away the recent events that have brought him and his wife to their current place in time. Swift is able to make us feel sympathy for this character all the while that the character is using the trials and tribulations of his family to explain the reasons that "it's not his fault". Shouldn't we feel sympathy for the students who must listen to Tom interpret the events of the past 300 years in a way that absolves himself of responsibility for the faults in his life and marriage? Thinking about this actually makes me want to read the book once more.....
Rating: 
Summary: History: A Never Ending Cycle
Review: Now that I have your attention I can begin telling you about this book. Waterland is an interesting read with many twists and turns that would make many readers' heads spin. Although I do not agree with the "Rich, ingenious, and inspired" review that the New York Times, (but who would listen to a reviewer who did not read the novel) I now have a newfound respect for Graham Swift as an author, now that I have read one of his works.
Waterland is a novel told by Tom Crick, who is a History teacher on the verge of becoming unemployed. He believes in his profession like most professionals do, but has to battle with students who do not want to participate in his lessons, and feel that history does not serve a purpose because it dwells on the past, and dwelling on the past means that something is not right. Price, a sixteen year old student of Tom Crick in his history class says this during an after school meeting. Tom Crick believes that there should be an explanation for everything; that nothing can be done without some reasonable and logical explanation. Price believes that to dwell on the past, means everything is not right with the world (167). He also says, "explaining's a way of avoiding the facts while you pretend to get near to them"(167). This line could sum up the entire novel in that almost of these characters involved with the story will constantly avoid facts. Henry Crick turns his back on Freddie Parr and counts to ten when he finds his body. He just wants to pretend that when he turns around, Freddie Parr's body will not be there. Tom does not want to believe Dick killed Freddie because then Tom will feel guilty because of his involvement with Mary. This novel leads to the question should history be an important part of our lives? Or should we just focus on the time being and worry about what we can control, instead of can't. Although Price is young and experienced in life, he makes valid point and Tom Crick is left to question himself.
All of these facts point towards valid reasoning for not being interested in History, or even with one's past. Although they are not direct results of his reasoning in the novel, the lines he speaks directly tie the theme of explanation and the here and now philosophy. By Tom explaining his life story in the novel, he is explaining exactly just what went wrong. Would he have been better off just focusing on the present instead of preaching the importance of the past? Although this theme could be seen as minor to some readers, I feel that without this moment of the novel, some of us would be left drowning in the novel. Oh you want to know about what I said about the here and now theme of this novel. Well let's just say it's "Rich,ingenious, and inspired" (The New York Times).
Rating:
Summary: Pure Genius
Review: Swift is a master. I wish he'd write more.
Best book I've ever read, hands down...
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