Waterland

Waterland (1983) is a postmodernist text by British novelist and short story writer Graham Swift. It centres around the efforts of Tom Crick, a history teacher, to convince his students of the value of history in a world that does not recognise the distinctions between history, story, and fairytales.

Waterland: author

Graham Swift is the author of Waterland. He was born in 1949 and had a relatively comfortable childhood. Swift became a Cambridge graduate in 1970 with a degree in English.

Swift worked as a teacher for a time and began writing in the 1980s. His first novel, The Sweet Shop (1980), discussed themes of time and the past. These would prove to be prevalent themes in his work. In the following years, Swift published multiple novels. Waterland and Last Orders (1996) were the most popular of these with Last Orders winning the Booker Prize.

Graham Swift has also released both short story and essay collections. His two short story collections are Learning to Swim and Other Stories (1982) and England and Other Stories (2014). England was particularly noted by critics for its multicultural discussions of English identity.

Swift is still writing today. He is now highly critically respected. Swift is known for his nuanced explorations of history and time and his use of postmodernist literary techniques.

Waterland: summary

Waterland revolves around the character of Tom Crick. Crick is a middle-aged history teacher from East Anglia. He is passionate about the topic of history, but there aren't many around him who share his views. Lewis Scott, the headmaster of the school he works in, believes history has become somewhat irrelevant.

He is trying to convince Crick to take early retirement. Crick initially refuses. He is forced into leaving when his wife, Mary, steals a baby. This is due to the growing mental instability that has been taking over her life since a traumatic event when she was a young woman. The scandal that ensues is the final event that pushes Crick out of his job.

Crick's students have also begun to question the value of studying history. Crick takes a particular interest in one student, Price. He sees potential in this young man, but Price also questions the point of teaching history in the modern age. Crick takes it upon himself to try and convince his students of the purpose of history. He moves away from teaching the accepted school curriculum. Instead, Crick begins to tell his students about his own personal history. This includes the history of his ancestors and the history of his own past as a young man in the 1940s.

Crick comes from two ancestral families, the Cricks and the Atkinsons. According to Crick, both of these families played key roles in shaping the area where Crick is from. This area is The Fens, a part of East Anglia. This part of England is known for its marshy land and rivers. The title of Waterland comes from this. 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. These ancestral stories stretch back to the seventeenth century.

Fig. 1 - The Fens of East Anglia have cultural and historical significance in Swift's Waterland.

Crick also engages in the telling of his own personal history. Waterland is not told in a linear or chronological fashion. 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. Crick tells a story of adolescent love. He, his mentally challenged brother Dick, and their friend Freddie Parr are all in love with the same woman. This woman is Mary Metcalf. Crick and Mary begin a relationship that results in Mary falling pregnant. Dick asks if the baby is his. Mary tells him it is Freddie's in an effort to protect Crick.

This plan backfires as Dick is sent into a rage that results in him killing Freddie. Freddie's body washes up on the shore near the Cricks' house. Initially, no one knows exactly what has happened. Crick eventually works out that his own brother is responsible for Freddie's murder. Dick also discovers some horrifying news.

Letters from his grandfather reveal that Crick and Dick's father is really only Dick's stepfather. Dick is the product of an incestuous relationship between his mother, Helen, and her father. Helen had passed away some years before this. The culmination of all these events results in Dick committing suicide.

Around the same time, Mary is struggling with her pregnancy. She decides to get an abortion. Crick helps her with this. A local woman who seems to resemble a witch performs the abortion. It is technically successful as Mary is no longer pregnant.

However, the abortion is also botched and leaves Mary infertile. She will never be able to have children. This turn of events explains why Mary stole a baby as a middle-aged woman. The trauma of never being able to have children has impacted her more and more throughout the years. This has deeply affected her mental health.

In the wake of Mary stealing a child, Crick begins to come to terms with the fact that his wife may be schizophrenic. He has her committed to an asylum. Many of Crick's stories were an attempt to educate Price about the value of history. This education seems to have benefitted Price but Crick is not positive about where Price's future will lead him.

Waterland: characters

The main characters in Waterland are Tom Crick, Mary Crick, Dick Crick, and Price.

Waterland: analysis

Waterland is a postmodernist novel.

A common experimental literary device used in postmodernist texts is metafiction.

Waterland exhibits the subgenre historiographic metafiction. Canadian academic Linda Hutcheon coined the term in 1987 in her essay 'Beginning to Theorize the Postmodern'. Historiographic metafictions self-consciously draw attention to how history and the practice of writing history are a construction. History is a narrative created by people which means historical documents can have biases and inaccuracies according to who wrote the documents, or whether such documents have been preserved in time.

The writing of history (known as historiography) is not linear nor does it have one singular viewpoint. Works of historiographic metafiction examine how history itself is a narrative and thus readers must examine the truth and lies in the historical record. Waterland blurs the definitions of history, story, and truth. Crick tries to teach his students the idea of history as an incomplete story in Waterland:

Crick mixes different kinds of history together in teaching his students. He teaches them about recognised historical events, his ancestral history, and his own personal history. These are multiple versions and viewpoints of history. This moves away from seeing history as one specific set of dates and documents, which is key to historiographic metafiction.

Fig. 2 - The map of East Anglia where the novel is set.

Waterland: themes

The main themes in Waterland are history and memory.

1. History and Memory: The novel reflects on the power of storytelling and memory in constructing personal and collective histories. Tom's reflections on his family's past and the history of the Fens demonstrate the role of storytelling in shaping our understanding of the world around us.

2. Environment and Human Communities: The novel explores the impact of environmental change on human communities, specifically the draining of the Fens in the 17th and 18th centuries. The traumatic event disrupted the social and economic structures of the region and forced its inhabitants to adapt to new ways of life.

3. Family and Relationships: The novel delves into the complex relationships between family members, including the dynamics of power, violence, and betrayal. Tom's reflections on his family's past reveal the hidden tensions and secrets that have shaped their relationships over time.

4. Masculinity and Identity: The novel explores themes of masculinity and identity, particularly through the character of Tom, who struggles to come to terms with his own sense of self and place in the world. The novel also examines the ways in which societal expectations of masculinity can lead to violence and aggression.

5. Change and Continuity: The novel explores the tension between change and continuity, particularly in relation to the shifting landscape of the Fens. While the draining of the Fens represented a profound change in the region, the novel suggests that the underlying rhythms and cycles of life continue, albeit in different forms.

Main ideas of Waterland

The main ideas present in Graham Swift's Waterland are of loss.

Waterland: loss

Loss is very prevalent in Waterland. Many of the central characters lose very significant things throughout Swift's novel. The impact of loss is also shown.

Crick loses much in Waterland. He loses his job because of the devaluing of history and also because of Mary's actions. But Crick loses much more than just this. He will no longer have the ability to educate students on the importance of history. This is clearly a passion of his and very important to him. It is part of the reason why he abandons the school curriculum and teaches history in a much more personal way for the short time he has left at the school.

Crick also loses his wife in a way. Mary's clear mental illness means she is eventually committed to an asylum. This is likely to have a drastic impact on their marital relationship. As a young man, Crick also lost his brother, Dick, to suicide because of a series of tragedies.

Mary also experiences significant losses in Waterland. These happen when she is a young woman but impact the rest of her life and the lives of those around her. Mary's botched abortion results in her losing the ability to ever have children. As she gets older, it becomes clear that she desperately wants children. Her infertility drastically affects her mental health to the point in which she is unstable enough to steal a baby. Not only does she lose the ability to have children, Mary gradually loses her mind throughout Waterland too.

Crick's mentally challenged brother Dick both experiences and causes loss in Swift's Waterland. Dick is romantically interested in Mary but loses his opportunity to be with her as she falls for Crick and becomes pregnant. This loss affects Dick and sends him into a rage. This rage drives him to murder Freddie Parr. Dick's state of mind is made even worse by the fact that he discovers he is the product of incest. He loses any sense of his lineage because of this. All this culminates in Dick losing his life via suicide.