The Booker-winning novel combines elements of a Gothic family saga, detective story, and philosophical reflection on the meaning of history and nature. Moreover, Swift’s history appears in a variety of forms: the “big” history that the hero of the novel teaches to schoolchildren, the “small” local history of Fenland - the “Land of Water”, the history of human relationships, romantic and cruel. The biography of a teacher who is in danger of being laid off and whose “waste” speech constitutes the external level of the novel, on many levels echoes the two-century history of his family, also full of drama and bloody madness of truly Faulknerian proportions...