Waterland

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It isn’t by the time he’s finished his extraordinary swim, leading to all kinds of speculation about why that might be. He refuses the head’s offer of a few months’ leave—because, ‘children… you listened, all ears, you listened to those new-fangled lessons’—until something else happens.

Graham Swift was born in 1949 and is the author of eleven novels,two collections of short stories, including the highly acclaimed England and Other Stories, and of Making an Elephant, a book of essays, portraits, poetry and reflections on his life in writing. The publicity that attends her arrest reflects badly on the school, and Tom is told that he now must retire. There is the small community, enclosed by its own watery boundaries and separated from the rest of the country which barely gets a mention, close family (sometimes too close) and customs that are a throwback to times that if not simpler, were certainly less self-conscious. At different points in these chapters he goes over the desperate day when he arrives home to discover Mary with the baby she says God has promised her, a different day when, by placing the incriminating bottle in plain sight in Dick’s room, Dick’s reaction proved that he really, really didn’t want anybody else to find it… and he describes a deep trauma from 60 years before, when his father Henry was nursed out of his own breakdown by Helen, the daughter of Ernest Atkinson, now a nurse in the hospital that had been her family home.

It starts small: ’she suddenly and deliberately stops work with her old people, leaving herself with no occupation but to survey the flat and uniform terrain of thirty years of marriage while he surveys his rows of teenagers. Postmodernism promotes many of the same beliefs as modernism, but it does not see these things negatively. 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.

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. They eye each other across the river and, not on the first occasion but a later one—she’s interested—Mary asks him for an eel from the sack he has. It would be easy for him to assume that only Mary does, and not him, because ‘in her fifty-third year’ she starts to behave strangely. The narrator, a history teacher named Tom Crick, is about to be forced into retirement and, though he has personal grief of his own to contend with, we feel that, more than anything else, it is the age in which he lives, an age that denies history any place in the education system, that Crick grieves for most. 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.What he forgets, however, is that humans need stories to live well, with others and with nature, and that, when the progressives bulldoze their way through what they think of as the redundant past, what they are really doing is stealing from others a set of narratives, and a way of life, that is, for them, the vivid present, that is: tradition. Graham Swift nous raconte donc plusieurs histoires, qui finalement n'en font qu'une: l'histoire des Fenlands, l'histoire des ancêtres du narrateur (grandeur et décadence d'une famille), l'histoire du narrateur lui-même: un épisode de sa jeunesse (ses amours, son frère Dick, simple d'esprit, et un meurtre.

I’m sure that Crick mentions this because he agrees, and makes no comment when Lewis, his headteacher, asserts forthrightly—he shares that habit with Crick—that nobody can truly work with children who hasn’t been a parent. I’m doing what Crick does, offering thumbnail versions of events in the knowledge that there’s a lot more to be told about them. The more I read, the more I’m convinced his main reason for telling this story is to stop himself going mad. The next time, she has a bucket, and he swims over, holding a struggling eel firmly enough for it not to escape.His most recent novel, Mothering Sunday, became an international bestseller and won The Hawthornden Prize for best work of imaginative literature. It’s before we even get to this, in Chapter 2, that we realise that it isn’t really the headmaster’s prejudice about history that is easing Crick out of his job. 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. The progress of the project was constantly hampered both by the unexpected natural consequences of the industrial-scale drainage of countless square miles of peatland, and the lack of co-operation on the part of the locals. The young Tom realises that it’s gone into the box, along with all the other secrets we only begin to hear about later.

He has been spending the summer afternoons with her exploring every last detail of their sexual development. We also get to find out that the Atkinson heir who brought it about was Ernest, the father of Crick’s mother Helen. We’re cutting back history,’ says his progress-obsessed headmaster, so this novel is, in part, valedictory. This includes the history of his ancestors and the history of his own past as a young man in the 1940s. It’s Ernest, Crick’s grandfather, who unwittingly brought about the end of something, first by proving the family’s waning local influence by spectacularly failing to be elected to Parliament, and then by making a comeback that ends in chaos and destruction.And so on, for another long chapter, About the Ouse, until we are back where we were fifteen pages ago, at Longitude 0 ˚. Now come the details of how his father clumsily hauls the body from the water, so that new injuries begin to hide what is visible at first, a big bruise on the face.