Waterland

History teacher Tom Crick approaches his subject in a novel way, mixing in intimate details of his own life with accounts of the Fenlands of East Anglia, the French Revolution, and the unfolding saga of his forbears, the Cricks and the Atkinsons.

Those personal details? Why, nothing less than sex, murder, suicide, incest, abortion, kidnapping, revenge, madness, and a legacy of hallucinogenic beer.

But it's not the lurid bits that make the book worth reading, it's the superb prose, fanciful tone, and fey observations about life and the nature of history.

The latter after all is just a yarn, circular and unreliable, full of "useless Ifs." Yet:

There are times...when good, dry, textbook history takes a plunge into the old swamps of myth and has to be retrieved with empirical fishing lines.

The story's various strands are chopped up and fed to the reader in a vaguely chronological order. The setting is a "fairy-tale place" of floods, locks, catchments, barge pools, lighter wharves, sluice-engines, drainage boards, silt, phlegm, and...

Eels. The book is full of them. People catch and eat them, there's one in the frontispiece, and another that gets thrust into a girl's knickers. They even turn up in shell holes during WWI. An entire chapter is devoted to their mysterious ways, and at the end of the book, when Cricky's half-brother, a potato-head named Dick (with an enormous dick), dives into the water, he is obeying perhaps "the call of the far Sargasso."

Waterland was published in 1983 and shortlisted for the Booker that year. (It lost out to Coetzee.) In 1996 its author, Graham Swift, won for Closing Time.