Waterland

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It’s an awkward moment—and, unknown to the boy, it picks away at a wound going back nearly 40 years.

Famous postmodernist texts include Underworld (1997) by Don DeLillo and Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis (1915). The narrator is a middle-aged high school history teacher who is facing forced retirement because the school wants to get rid of him and get rid of history.The reason Dick wants to show Tom the contents of the box is to do with new, confusing information coming his way. 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. Waterland is about Tom Crick, a history teacher who is losing his job because history is no longer seen as important by his school's headmaster.

He, having lived alone with her for too long, starts to believe that a son of his is destined to become the next Saviour (capital S) of the world. About the Rise of the Atkinsons takes up 37 pages, and is the history of the dynasty whose capable menfolk are 18th- and 19th-Century archetypes of entrepreneurial creativity. Tom's reflections on his family's past reveal the hidden tensions and secrets that have shaped their relationships over time. In other words, Swift isn’t being one of those authors who, for effect, make their narrators hold back some information for no reason that makes any plausible motivational sense. This is what one kind of unreliable narrator does, feeding us those titbits and only bringing out the big reveal when he knows it will have the biggest effect.Why would the wily adult Crick describe in such detail the catching and mounting of a huge pike on the last day of WW1, presented to I can’t remember which family member for I can’t remember what reason, and now safely out of the way on the wall of Dick’s room? I’m guessing that my sense—any reader’s sense—of his growing desperation is down to the fact that the project was doomed from the beginning. 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. How many of the events of history have occurred, ask yourselves, for this or for that reason, but for no other reason, fundamentally, than the desire to make things happen? His most recent novel, Mothering Sunday, became an international bestseller and won The Hawthornden Prize for best work of imaginative literature.

The novel addresses some three hundred years of local history – including that of Tom's family – this relates to the broader historical currents of past centuries. 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. Waterland is a classic of modern fiction: a vision of England seen through its mysterious, amphibious Fen country; a sinuous meditation on the workings of time; a tale of two families, startling in its twists and turns and universal in its reach.The confused circumstances of the death, and the narrator’s bland allusion to the fact that the pathologist never looks closely enough to notice the earlier bruise on Freddie’s temple, are irrelevant to her. Nothing is quite solid about Tom: his father, a lock-keeper, his brother Dick , “born a freak, a potato-head. 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.