Silt life
Waterland, by Graham Swift
£6.99, Picador
Tom Crick is in trouble. His wife has committed a miserable and foolish crime: precipitated by events long past; precipitating Crick’s dismissal from his post as a history teacher. The school’s headmaster has finally been given the excuse to downsize humanities in favour of the sciences, and Crick’s backlash is the generation-spanning tapestry of Waterland. Where scientific principles might never have helped him, Crick develops his own view of progress and the advancement of time: civilization, and the existence of each civilized man, is nothing more than the excavation of accumulated silt, the continuous fight against nature to prevent dirt from blocking life, love and intelligent thought.
Supporting this gloomy but inevitable conclusion are the multiple strands of Crick’s family history, the history and development of the fenland where his and his wife’s families have lived for generations, and even the course of English and world histories. Swift, narrating as Crick, develops themes on business big and small, transport and the folly of great schemes into a crescendo that focus history on the single act of Crick’s wife, and the parallel events some twenty years ago involving Crick’s educationally subnormal brother.
A seamless mixture of human endeavour on both the large and small scale, Waterland is occasionally let down by the indeterminacy of one of its major conceits: to whom is Crick preaching his message? To the converted? The unconverted? The eternally apostate? To bring this in line with the ultimate recipients of the speech—children, dear children—Swift has had to execute appropriately quick turnarounds, and it is here that the story hiccups. But this is a minor fault, observed retrospectively, and for most of the novel the reader is drawn inexorably, like mud down the Ouse to the open sea, to a bleak, lonely and watery conclusion.
posted at: 17:50 |
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I want you to do me a favour
Last Orders, by Graham Swift
£7.99, Picador (1999)
(This review appeared in the ReadReverb newsletter, Dec 9, 2005, and on the ReadReverb website)
Family butcher, hard drinker, self-styled patriarch of his little local clique: it’s not for Bermondsey’s Jack Dodds to go gentle into that good night. But even he wouldn’t have expected his drinking mates to turn the long journey with his ashes to Margate into a tour of the furthest reaches of south-east England. There’s the gambler, the fighter, the undertaker and the car dealer (who’s Jack’s son and yet not Jack’s son); but where’s Amy, Jack’s long-suffering? Who’s she going to visit instead, and why would Jack never acknowledge their existence? What’s the big mystery of the camper van, and why would a man on his death-bed need a thousand pounds in cash? Did he really take it all with him?
Once again Swift has written a book which is as much about the English countryside as about its main players. Jack’s final journey takes us through Kent (the garden of England, as we’re often reminded), and almost everyone gets a chance to tell a section or two from their point of view. Through this multiplicity of voices little histories are made to hang off the big geography like beads off a rosary: a war memorial in Chatham rubs shoulders with hop fields on the south coast; the Black Prince makes a guest appearance; and horses gallop from Chepstow to Towcester, carrying the fortunes of everyone, not just Lucky Raysy. Mud, soil, sand and spray are all churned up and flung at the reader.
The plot is almost entirely played out by setting conflicting narratives against each other. Half a dozen people can tell the reader half a dozen different lies, and by assembling this patchwork one can work out what’s really happened. Sometimes the book-length warps of Last Orders are in danger of being smothered by this blanket of voices, but Swift is endlessly picking up the weft and pulling it in a new direction, and it turns out that nothing is ever truly lost: not the thread, nor the plot, nor the point, nor the characters’ own personal freedoms. Not even Jack, as at the hands of his friends he slowly becomes part of first this field and then that patch of sea… Albion to Albion… dust to dust.
posted at: 16:19 |
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