COVERS: WATERLAND

Graham Swift's Waterland was first published in 1983 by William Heinneman, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize that year. It is a general fiction novel set in the East Anglian Fens, with a notable emphasis placed on the natural history and geography of the area.

Though dated and very simple, this first edition of Waterland is my favourite. The eel is a simple motif that runs throughout the book, and it makes a potent symbol on the cover, standing out as something unusual. It immediately recalls a wet and wild setting, but also a setting inhabited by man, as this is an eel out of water; eerily spermatozoic, it foreshadows some of the book's themes of sexual awakening and incest; from a distance, it also resembles an aerial view of a river, another prominent feature in the book's geography. The accompanying text is basic and understated in a manner that gives the image precedence.

Heavily photographic covers seem to be Waterland's staple; perhaps something in the book's nature, with its digressions into factual monologue and preoccupation with natural sciences, is felt harder to express in something more illustration- or design-focused. I am not certain of the exact years of these two editions, but I estimate the late 1990s. I think the main feature of both, besides atmospheric monochrome imagery, is the serif typeface: again, understated and simple, but increasingly sophisticated, lending a very serious, literary air.

This is the latest edition of Waterland, and the version which I own. Having mentioned the lack of design-based covers previously, this cover brings an altogether different style to the table. All of Swift's work was recently reissued by Picador with covers based on this uniform template: a simple photograph serving as a background texture, with a white cut-out shape relating to the story (in Waterland's case, a floating bottle). The design itself is attractively clean and enigmatic, and Swift's bibliography now looks more appealing and collectible than ever, but I feel it lacks any expression of the Waterland's tone and atmosphere, so strongly portrayed on previous editions. I do not dislike this edition, but consider Picador to have undermined the character of such an unusual book, either failing or deciding not to making the most of the brooding, literary tone and pastoral Gothicism that is the novel's backbone.

Waterland is my favourite of the books I have read this year, despite my petty aggrievement of not finding a copy with a "better" cover. I think there is a lot of unexplored mileage remaining, as far as its existing covers go. There is a noticeable lack of more hand-crafted or illustrated cover art, for example, though I believe drawing could be applied to strong complementary effect: perhaps something resurrecting imagery of the eel, which I found so effective on the earliest editions, and involving illustration of a technical nature (like biological drawing, alluding to some of the book's factual content).