Waterland: Introduction by Tim Binding (Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series)

Waterland: Introduction by Tim Binding (Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series)

Graham Swift’s extraordinary masterpiece—a finalist for the Booker Prize—WATERLAND weaves together eels and incest, ale-making and madness, the heartless sweep of history and a family romance as tormented as Greek tragedy into one epic story. In the flat, watery Fen Country of East Anglia, a passionate history teacher named Tom Crick is being forced into early retirement from the school where he has taught for thirty years. When a student rebelliously questions the value of the subject to which Tom has devoted his life, Tom responds with his own personal retrospective. His story—intertwined with the stories of the local wetlands, the French Revolution, and World War II, among other things—throws light onto the dark circumstances of the current day, revealing how his wife’s tragic youth led to the events surrounding his forced retirement. A monumental tribute to the past, a gripping multigenerational family saga, and a powerful affirmation of the history of self, this exceptional novel illuminates the cycles of time in which we live. Introduction by Tim Bunding “ Waterland appropriates the Fens as Moby-Dick did whaling or Wuthering Heights the moors—a beautiful, serious, and intelligent novel, admirably ambitious and original.” — The Observer “A formidably intelligent book—animated by an impressive, angry pity at what human creatures are capable of doing to one another in the name of love and need.” — The New York Review of Books “Swift spins a tale of empire-building, land reclamation, brewers and sluice-minders, bewhiskered Victorian patriarchs, insane and visionary relicts . . . A book of strange, insidious, unsettling power.” — Books and Bookmen “Teems with energy, fertility, violence, madness . . . Demonstrates the irrepressible, wide-ranging talent of this young British writer.” — The Washington Post Book World “Extraordinary . . . A personal book, a book that speaks to the innermost core of the reader . . . Waterland is history, it is exploration. Waterland is geography, lineage. It is commerce, decline and fall, the industrial revolution (the French one, too, with heads lopped off) and, like everything around us, it bears the scars of the two great wars of the twentieth century. It is family saga, family secrets, love, licit and otherwise; it is, above all, an exploration into what it is, this history thing, that affects us all, your history, mine, ours.” —from the Introduction by Tim Binding Graham Swift is the author of six novels, including the Booker Prize-winning Last Orders. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages. He lives in London, England. Excerpted from the Introduction I was sitting on the steps of a caravan. It was winter and the sun was out. The house we had bought was still a wreck. I was a junior editor at Penguin and Graham had given me the first sixty or so pages of his new novel. I had worked on Graham’s second novel Shuttlecock and we had become friends. This was his third novel. It was to be called Waterland . Almost at once, from the very opening, from those first few promises of stories and ancestry and mother’s milk, I knew instinctively that I was in the presence of something extra- ordinary, something which, when opened fully, was going to envelop me like a glorious burst of light, changing me and the world I lived in forever. Reading a great book is a discovery of its own. The reader feels an almost limitless thrill, like an archaeologist must when stumbling upon a fabled burial site or the lost skull of civilization. It is as if you have discovered this treasure by yourself, and it is yours and yours alone. You take possession of it, guard it jealously. Sure, that moment will pass. Later you will offer up its secrets to others, allow them to talk of it, handle it with (as far as you are concerned) disturbing familiarity, but for those precious hours and days it belongs to no one else, and you hug it closely, protecting every page. That was how I felt, reading those sixty pages. That is how everyone feels, first reading those sixty pages and beyond. It is yours, made just for you. What is more, to some unfathomable degree, it is your story too, in more ways than you thought possible. Circumstances changed. By the time Graham had finished the novel, I had moved to become editor of Picador. In those days Picador was solely a paperback house, but happily, partly thanks to our previous relationship, it came about that Waterland would be published by Heinemann in hardcover and a year later in paperback, at Picador. I would edit the novel, along with David Godwin at Heinemann. It was a big book for me. It was a big book for Graham. It’s a big book for everyone who reads it. This is a personal introduction, because it seems to me that is what Waterland is. A personal book, a book that speaks to the innermost core of the reader, digging into the psyche, asking questions, unearthing feelings, seeding ideas, suspicions, that ha