Waterland

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Just as he does in connection with his life, I’m finding that everything in this novel is bound in some way or another to everything else. He rows them towards the dredger, accompanied by two interested American airmen—whose uniforms, as far as Tom can tell, cause Dick to panic.

I taught you that there is never any end to that question, because, as I once denied it for you (yes, I confess a weakness for improvised definitions), history is that impossible thing: the attempt to give an account, with incomplete knowledge, of actions themselves undertaken with incomplete knowledge. It’s the last day of his final term, and he is sitting with his colleagues looking at the back of the headmaster’s balding head as he mouths platitudes to the assembled school about Crick’s wonderful career.He knows he can’t change a thing, has explained why he isn’t wasting his own time with ‘if only,’ but he is relentless in spelling out what it has left him with. His wife, Mary, is infertile due to a botched abortion and this has had a detrimental effect on her mental wellbeing. It’s the single most consciously artistic aspect of the novel, and for me, after nearly 40 years, this is what I remember most vividly about it. Compulsively readable, it is a novel of resonant depth and encyclopaedic richness, mixing human and natural history and exploring the tragic forces that take us both forwards and back. It’s as though Crick, or some historical imperative, is reminding us all that women have a power that men ignore or marginalise at their peril.

Famous postmodernist texts include Underworld (1997) by Don DeLillo and Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis (1915). Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting marker-buoys and trail-signs of stories. I’m going to stop speculating, although I think there will be more to say on this after I’ve read the whole novel. He’s sitting in the sunny space between the chicken coop and the kitchen door, where Mother stands, in her apron. He might know where all the timelines are leading, and the way he’s telling it might show that he wants to be in charge of how each element in all of them unfolds.The overarching question asked by the narrator is why do some people have such a need to study history and to tell, and be told, stories. The older, seen-it-all-before Tom Crick describes the absurd pantomime of Dick’s attempt to hide it secretly up in the attic, the creaking of the steps making it plain not only what he’s doing, but that he doesn’t want anybody to know. This is the moment, the narrator tells us, when childhood ended for both of them, and all of Mary’s unbounded curiosity left her.

The only thing I’d remembered about the coming-together of the storylines was how Mary ended up unable to have children. Dick had also been in the habit of making his way to see Mary, in the evenings after work, and she had told him not only that she was pregnant—I’ll come back to that—but that the father was Freddie. The British Academy’s programme of public lectures provides distinguished academics with a forum for serious extended discussion of important issues. It was only recently, after reading and watching books and movies set in the American south that I reconnected with Waterland and realised that it is essentially American gothic set in the damp heart of the East Anglian fens.Every chapter presented by this narrator encapsulates how ordinary lives are inseparable from history. It’s a master-stroke on Swift’s part to have this desperate man resort to a kind of narrative sleight of hand, a trick. I remembered as I re-read it the description of the woman, her smell, her stinking cottage like something from a different century. The publicity that attends her arrest reflects badly on the school, and Tom is told that he now must retire.

Within a few generations, they no longer try to hold back the work of the entrepreneurs draining the land. Chapter 9, which I’ve just finished reading, is a 37-page history of the (fictitious) family that was largely responsible for draining and developing this part of Fenland. In the 17th Century the Cricks had opposed the first efforts to drain the fens, because they were fine with things as they were. And we remember how, right from the beginning of the novel, he has insisted on how a moment in the ‘here and now’ can echo down the years. This is why progressives always get tradition so wrong: they think it pertains to the past; but in reality, tradition always operates in the present.

Le roman est dense et riche, mais aucun élément n'est gratuit: tout s'enchaîne, tout s'agence admirablement bien, preuve que le romancier maîtrise parfaitement son oeuvre. 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.