Sympathetic Attraction

For several months I've entertained the thought that I wanted to see again the film adaptation of Graham Swift's novel, Waterland, (1992), set in the English Fenlands.  I don't know why.  I am pretty sure that I saw the film, starring Jeremy Irons, on the big screen when it came out.

On my desk at work is a pad of paper where I had jotted a title that looked interesting to me, Death Wore White, by Jim Kelly, a British police procedural.

I was almost finished with The Things They Carried, and I needed something else for the weekend.  I saw that Kelly had begun his writing career with a series featuring a newspaperman, Philip Dryden.  I borrowed Kelly's first novel, The Water Clock.  It was only after I began to read it today that I realized it was set in the Fenlands, in the area around the town of Ely in Cambridgeshire.

In the novel, Dryden covers the opening, attended by local dignitaries, of a brewery in Ely that has been converted into a cinema and restaurant complex.  The inaugural film?  Waterland.