Waterland

Product Information

The whole story, of course, was in diaries kept in that box in the attic, and Tom was always going to get access to it somehow. The fractured, intersecting timelines perfectly match his narrator’s obsession with how the ‘here and now’ of personal experience coalesces over time into one man’s own history.

The writing of history (known as historiography) is not linear nor does it have one singular viewpoint. Many of the events that Crick explains in his personal history help readers make sense of what has occurred in the earlier stages of Swift's novel.Tom is appalled and confused, and one of the first things he does is put right his lie about who had been the father of Mary’s child. First, out of a mixture of pity and self-loathing, Tom tells Dick that Mary’s child had not been Freddie’s but his, Dick’s. Tom's reflections on his family's past reveal the hidden tensions and secrets that have shaped their relationships over time. We don’t know what her plan turns out to be, because the next thing is Mary’s decision, in what must be the following year, to lock herself away for three years. His two short story collections are Learning to Swim and Other Stories (1982) and England and Other Stories (2014).

In having Crick painstakingly unpacking his own very particular agenda, Swift is able to present the reader with a hybrid version of the unreliable narrator. Crick describes his first discovery of female anatomy, from the coppery hairs that have appeared recently down to the folds inside that have the extraordinary capacity to cling first to one finger, then another. But this is happening just as the recovering Henry is falling in love with her, and she realises that if she marries him, any child who is born will be taken for his.He’s very good with anything practical, and his brother assures us that if he’d been brighter he could have made it as a professional engineer. Crick informs his students that the Atkinsons were the ones to drain The Fens and the Cricks were the ones to ensure that the rivers did not reclaim the land again. The speculative, piecemeal drainage of the Fens was an aspect of the region’s history I knew nothing of before I read this novel. In the years since its first publication, in 1983, Waterland has established itself as one of the classics of twentieth-century British literature: a visionary tale of England’s Fen country; a sinuous meditation on the workings of history; and a family story startling in its detail and universal in its reach.