Waterland

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Crick never spells it out that the events of this extraordinary evening when they were only thirteen had a direct influence on what came later—Mary’s sexual curiosity, Tom’s own, Dick’s introduction to a world he had previously understood nothing of. Regardless of the connections beween Swift's masterpiece and great American novels, this is a fantastic book completely soaked in the atmosphere of its surroundings and doing for the fens what Hardy did for Wessex and Du Maurier for Cornwall. In a different chapter, a follow-up to the one about the epic successes of the Atkinson family, we get to know how the decline of the little empire was finally confirmed. In the wake of Mary stealing a child, Crick begins to come to terms with the fact that his wife may be schizophrenic. The botched abortion is a harrowing final playing-out of that story, but it isn’t where the novel ends.

Maybe it is, but only in his determination not to leave anything out that might be important, or in some way helpful. He knows that they are too important to him, fill a space in his life he never describes as having been brought about by his childlessness. It’s only while looking back that I realise that it comes quite early on in the chapters I’m dealing with in this section. 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. 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.

Dick dives into the water, stays underwater so long nobody ever sees him come up, and he is never seen again. But there are a lot of things I haven’t mentioned, including the way the chapters are becoming shorter and more fragmented-seeming. This started before Mary’s complete collapse into psychosis, as we gather early on in the novel, but leads to the crisis of his employability following the sensationalised reporting of it in the press. There’s his decision, if it ever was a conscious decision, to feed elements of his own history and that of the Fens into his teaching, elements which, he asserts, are well-liked by his students. This is the highest praise I can offer, because there’s nothing more admirable in a novelist than having total control over the narrative.

He, his mentally challenged brother Dick, and their friend Freddie Parr are all in love with the same woman.Like Chapter 3, it’s largely a fictional account, but the detail in it makes it clear that Graham Swift knows what he is writing about. Tom and his father hear him riding off on his motorbike, and know he’s filled his eel-sack with all the remaining bottles. This third-person version of events isn’t unusual, as Crick narrates the story, or history, of this unfulfilled couple. 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.

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. Postmodernism promotes many of the same beliefs as modernism, but it does not see these things negatively. Dick’s oversized penis—the young Crick’s worry that she might not have been telling the truth about what he had or had not been able to do with her—and the insistently phallic significance of the eels in these two stories, only seem to make it clear that nothing is clear. But—and we seem to have moved forward to the crucial summer of 1943 by now—he’s interested enough in it all to concoct a confused plan.The first chapter narrates an event in Crick’s childhood, the second is where we find out about the trouble he’s in at work in the current timeline—and the third, About the Fens, consists of eleven pages of the history of the region up to, and including, his father Henry Crick’s appointment as lock-keeper. The only thing I’d remembered about the coming-together of the storylines was how Mary ended up unable to have children. In his own confused state, he is desperate to make Dick understand that he must never have children of his own. We’ve already been introduced to this box, because it features in a different part of the Dick/Freddie/Mary story that Tom Crick has just been adding details to.