Graham Swift’s Waterland received praise almost across the board. His third book, a sweeping look at history shortlisted for the 1983 Man Booker Prize, Waterland won Swift recognition in America and occasioned a re-reading of his earlier works. As Walter Clemons wrote, Swift’s first books are “first moves toward mastery,” but Waterland stands strong as the “truly extraordinary” result of Swift’s building upon and culling together his earlier themes. Waterland’s “extremely vigorous and complex metaphorical life,” described by Alan Hollinghurst, was seen as a sign of the author’s reaching his full potential. Hillary DeVries, meanwhile, compared the work to Gothic romances and melodramas, and noted that "critics have praised his novel's style as the perfect match for his subject". Though some reviewers had qualms about what DeVries called Swift’s “digressive and discontinuous narrative,” most responded positively to the broad, diverse subjects Waterland addresses in such didactic form. Peter Prescott praised Swift’s mastery of the teacherly method: “So artful is Swift, so surehanded with his diverse material, that the great complexity of his design poses no problem for his reader. And his prose, for its resonance and clarity, makes immersion in Waterland a pleasure.” Hollinghurst saw a great symbolic tension, evocative of the nature of history at large, in Swift’s “magnificent narrative exposition, constantly threatened by dissolution and inertia.” He described Tom Crick’s lecturing style as representative, in all its “absurdity” and “falseness,” of the fictional relationship necessary for each of us to construct in order to grapple with history:
These Ôpreposterous lessons’, these Ôcircus acts' are [Crick’s] idiosyncratic way of substituting for the official body of history the tangled, fateful, and exemplary history of his own life. It is an audacious notion on Swift's part, and one whose absurdity is a kind of guarantee of its unnerving effectiveness. Yet it is also a dangerous one, for the intensely rhetorical address, the mournful, hortatory appeals to his 'children', the desperate driving home of basic points, are tiring to the reader who has been out of the schoolroom for quite some time. Of course, in a way typical of Swift, the very emphaticness of all this is a warning as to its falseness. The novel exceeds credibility and attenuates our tolerance in exactly the same degree as it creates, through his own words, the portrait of a man who is deeply disturbed, and who is vainly attempting to build a structure from these words which will protect him from his childlessness, from his failure to create the future.
Hollinghurst found thematic meaning underlying the dramatic failures of Tom’s long, tangential, and sometimes tedious “hortatory” appeals. Yet there was also a concern, despite the self-consciousness which Hollinghurst locates in Tom and Swift alike, that the professorial tone, which seeps into the protagonist’s verbal style from his bookish author, might undermine the validity of his words. For example, Michiko Kakutani warned that "the author's cleverness and bookish sensibility — in addition to Hardy, there are echoes in this volume of Faulkner, Melville, Sterne and Gúml;unter Grass — also have a way of subverting his story." In other words, Swift’s protagonist seems at times a culling together of historical voices rather than a voice of history in his own right, and this has dangerous effects upon Swift’s philosophical aims.
Indeed, reviewers mostly hesitated to accept Tom Crick’s characterization, his lack of personality: Hollinghurst referred to Crick’s desperate “need for an efficient and absolving causality” in the face of his own lack of action and agency, as well as his frequent self-negation, his “significant suppression of the first person: Crick habitually sees himself in the third person, both narrator and subject.” Perhaps this oscillation between narrator and non-agential “subject” led to Swift’s later worry that the main voice in his novel couldn’t be represented in film, his definition of the novel as wholly “unfiilmable” (recorded by Richard Combs). Either way, Tom Crick’s function as a “mouthpiece” rather than an active character risks eroding our interest in his story: as Kakutani insisted, "Because Tom is less a full-blown character than a bland, vaguely brainy mouthpiece for Mr. Swift's own ideas, these shards of personal reminiscence are interesting in the way that jigsaw puzzle pieces are interesting - we are curious about how they will fit together, not what picture they will eventually form."
Finally — and surprisingly, given the reviewers’ focus on Tom’s bookish manner and Waterland’s philosophical slant — several writers drew comparisons between Swift and Faulkner. As Prescott wrote, “Even the most lurid melodrama becomes literature when the manner of its telling becomes sufficiently complex. Faulkner knew that; so does Graham Swift.” More specifically, DeVries referenced Swift’s place in a “trend” of localizing his story: “Replete with slithery eels, creaking canal locks, and mysterious drownings, Swift's Fenlands is every bit as strange and evocative as Marquez's native Colombia or Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County." Like Kakutani, DeVries also saw connections between Swift and Thomas Hardy, John Fowles, and “Dickensian plot twists as well as a skepticism about man’s ability to improve himself or his situation.” Overall, Swift’s Waterland was well-received in its moment and fitted itself smoothly into a Western literary history; it is left to us to decide how much this comfortable place in literary history undermines Waterland’s attempt to critique history itself.
Questions
1. Several reviewers compare Swift to William Faulkner, yet Waterland differs from Faulknerian novels in its single-narrator form, its lack of heavy accents, its lack of minorities, and its preference to guess characters’ reactions rather than represent their internal thoughts. What might motivate the reviewers to link these two authors together, despite such glaring differences? Does Swift illustrate the Fenlands the way Faulkner illustrates the South? Why do topics like incest, retardation, and dominant, powerful families play such a large role in these narratives of the outskirts?
2. What vision of England does Swift offer us in Waterland? How do the haunted, eel-filled, flooding Fenlands, with their histories of brewing, farming, and gate-keeping, compare with the marshes of Great Expectations or the sooty, industrial London of Jack Maggs?
3. Tom Crick asks his class (and us, the readers), “When — where — how do we stop asking why? How far back? When are we satisfied that we possess an explanation?” Does Swift offer a full explanation of his characters and their histories in this novel? Why does Michiko Kakutani call Tom “less a full-blown character than a bland, vaguely brainy mouthpiece for Mr. Swift’s own ideas”? Is Tom an absence or an active character in Waterland? Do the novel’s frequent ellipses invite us to guess at Tom’s emotions the way he guesses at the thoughts and feelings of his own “fairy tale” characters?
4. Kakutani calls Waterland “a book that reads at once as a gothic family saga, a detective story and as a philosophic meditation on the nature and uses of history." What is at stake in Swift’s decision to link strains of the Gothic tradition with elements of detection fiction in a meditation on history and storytelling? Does history always haunt us? Are we immediately acting as detectives when we delve into history?
5. How does Swift’s novel compare with other novels on the Booker Prize list for 1983 (http://www.themanbookerprize.com/prize/archive/17), namely Salman Rushdie’s Shame, which looks at the political, historical, and linguistic landscape of an imagined country similar to Pakistan, and to J.M. Coetzee’s The Life and Times of Michael K, which sets itself in a South Africa torn by civil war. Does Swift’s novel have a comparable political agenda?
Works Cited
Clemons, Walter. "A Swift Arrival." Newsweek. 24 June 1985: pp 74.
Combs, Richard. "Rewriting History." The Guardian (London). 18 August 1992: pp 28.
DeVries, Hilary. "Author Swift spins individual lives into fabric of history." Christian Science Monitor. 18 June 1985: pp 25.
Hollinghurst, Alan. "Of time and the river." Times Literary Review. 7 October 1983: pp. 1073.
Kakutani, Michiko. "Books of the Times." The New York Times. 20 March 1984: pp 19.
Prescott, Peter S. "Faulkner of the Fens." Newsweek. 30 April 1984: pp 75A.
