I enjoyed this novel much more having finished it, than I did half way through. It's structure is complicated; chapters describing the history of the fens and the Atkinson family are intermingled with memories of a fateful time in the narrator's childhood and current events, the narrator's crisis in later years. The story is intriguing, the structure works well in tying together all the strands of the narrative and whilst the narrator's contemporary ramblings are necessary to the plot and Swift's characterisation of him, they are often tedious.
It is a novel absolutely about the fens, its landscape and the effect it has on the people living and working there. It's also about families, madness and the huge and rippling effects of what might be, in other situations, minor events. There is so much in this novel, Swift uses and questions the idea of 'history' to great effect, it is a book which needs mulling over.
