Waterland by Graham Swift

First published: 1983

Type of work: Novel of ideas

Time of work: The 1970’s, with flashbacks to the eighteenth century, the nineteenth century, and the first half of the twentieth century

Locale: Greenwich, England, and the Fenlands of Norfolk near the River Leem

Principal Characters:

• Tom Crick, history master at a private secondary school
• Mary Metcalf Crick, Tom’s wife
• Henry Crick, Tom’s father
• Dick Crick, Tom’s brother
• Freddie Parr, a sixteen-year-old who drowns
• Lewis Scott, the physics teacher and headmaster of Tom’s school
• Price, one of Tom’s students, identified only by his last name
• Thomas Atkinson, a member of an industrial family in the Fenlands district and a relative of Tom
• Sarah, his wife

The Novel

Tom Crick, fifty-two years old, has been history master for some thirty years in a private secondary school in Greenwich, a point of zero degrees longitude, in a sense the place where, in a world that sets its clocks according to Greenwich Mean Time, time begins. Tom’s wife, Mary, also in her early fifties, has been married to Tom for as long as he has been teaching. Until shortly before the immediate action of the story, she has been working with the elderly in a home. She has given up that job.

The students in Tom’s school have grown increasingly scientifically oriented, and the headmaster, Lewis Scott, himself a physicist, has little sympathy for Tom’s subject, a fact that he in no way masks. One of Tom’s students, Price, an intelligent sixteen-year-old whose father is a mechanic, presses Tom with questions about the relevance of learning about such historical events as the French Revolution. The youth’s skepticism causes Tom to change his teaching approach from one of presenting historical facts to one that involves his telling tales drawn from his own recollection. By doing so, he makes himself a part of the history he is teaching, relating his tales to local history and genealogy.

The headmaster has no sympathy for Tom’s new approach, even though it rekindles student interest in history. The headmaster tries to entice Tom into taking an early retirement at a decent pension. Tom resists because his leaving would mean that the History Department would cease to exist and history would simply be combined with the broader area of General Studies.

Finally, Tom’s hand is forced because his wife is arrested for stealing a baby from a shopping cart outside a market. She testifies that God told her to do it. The publicity that attends her arrest reflects badly on the school, and Tom is told that he now must go into retirement. He is given no alternative.

This is the bare frame of a story that becomes extremely complicated and convoluted. Tom uses his impending forced retirement as an excuse to unfold an extremely interesting story to his students. The bulk of Waterland is devoted to this story that, before it is done, covers some three hundred years of local history and relates it to the broader historical currents of those three centuries. Tom even makes occasional brief excursions to Anglo-Saxon times in telling his tales.

The primary plot of the story has to do with Tom’s relationship to Mary both before and after their marriage. She is reared on a farm close to where Tom’s father, a lock-keeper, lives with his two sons in the lock-keeper’s cottage. His wife dies when Tom is eight years old. Mary is also reared by her father because her mother died giving birth to her. Her father, remaining faithful to his wife’s memory, has not remarried. He sees that his daughter receives strict religious training and that she attends a good church school.

As Mary matures, her interest in men grows, and she and Tom slip into an affair. It is discovered that Mary is pregnant. Tom’s brother Dick asks Mary if he is the father of the child. Mary says that he is not and lies to him, telling him that sixteen-year-old Freddie Parr is the father, although she has not had an affair with Freddie. Dick, distraught at this information, struggles with the drunken Freddie, who cannot swim, and pushes him into the River Leem. He drowns. It is Tom’s father who pulls Freddie from the sluice in the deep of night, not realizing that his drowning is anything but accidental, as the coroner’s inquest finally declares.

Mary tries to provoke a miscarriage but fails, so she and Tom, the father of the child, go to Mary Clay, an old crone, who performs an abortion that leaves Mary sterile. Her father forces her into seclusion, and for three years she remains isolated, engaging largely in prayer and meditation.

Tom is away fighting in World War II. Finally the two fathers agree to bring their children together again; unknown to them, Tom has already written to Mary. When he comes home, the two marry, and Tom begins his teaching career, while Mary takes a position in an old persons’ home. They live thus for more than thirty years; then Mary gives up her job and becomes actively involved in the church. Finally, she steals a baby because “God tells her to.” She explains the new arrival to Tom by saying that it is a gift from God. Obviously demented and obviously suffering from a pain that has been festering since her teenage abortion, Mary is arrested. Tom, as recounted above, is forced into an early retirement as a result of this disgrace.

A secondary plot involves the Atkinson family, which has run a brewery for many generations. Tom’s mother was an Atkinson. This subplot is interwoven intricately into the development and resolution of the primary plot.

The Characters

Waterland is a book of ideas more than it is a book of strong characterization. The architecture of the work is so intricately and carefully structured that it makes characterization of limited importance to the narrative.

Although his development, even as one of the two most fully realized characters in the novel, is minimal, Tom Crick is an interesting character. He is an idealist. He is the first person in his family to receive a solid formal education and is the first to be a teacher. His life is quite unremarkable until he decides to alter drastically the way he teaches history. Mary’s rash, psychotic act precipitates the end of his career, but it also provides the motivation for him to unravel to his students the long, intricate story that constitutes the central core of the novel.

Mary is more psychologically complex than Tom. The pull of religion and the pull of sex combine to lead her into difficult situations that generate in her a festering guilt. Her initial guilt is about her sexual curiosity. The next layer of guilt comes as she begins to have sexual encounters, and these encounters lead to her pregnancy, her abortion, and greater guilt. She withdraws from the world, becoming a virtual nun (Swift reveals that at this point Tom regards her as a Madonna). She tries to find in religion the means of coping with her guilt. When she finally marries Tom, he knows that she cannot have children, that he will have no issue. As his link with the future is lost, his link with the past, through history, becomes increasingly important to him. Mary, now facing menopause, has developed unnatural maternal feelings, which she attributes to God’s message. She regards the child she steals as God’s gift, but also, in her disturbed state, she regards it as a highly significant gift to her husband. Ironically, this gift and the act that produced it result in the end of her husband’s career.

The other characters are developed just enough to communicate the author’s ideas. Lewis Scott is a stereotype of the school administrator with a scientific background, who spurns history. Tom’s brother Dick, a somewhat stupid lout, is remarkable only for the size of his penis, to which Swift often alludes.

Of the characters that appear in reminiscences, Thomas Atkinson and his wife, Sarah, the subjects of the secondary plot, are especially important because, in many ways, their lives are comparable to Tom and Mary’s lives. Thomas married a younger woman. When she was thirty-seven and he was in his sixties, he suspected her, quite unjustly, of infidelity. In anger he struck her and knocked her down. She hit her head and lapsed into a coma. When she regained consciousness, her mind was addled, and so it stayed for the remaining years of her long life. Long after she had died, at the age of ninety-one, people reported seeing her ghost. In some ways, Mary may be viewed as a manifestation of that ghost.

Critical Context

Graham Swift is a highly original author. Although his work is not derivative, Waterland must inevitably be compared to the Wessex novels of Thomas Hardy, particularly to The Return of the Native (1878), in which Egdon Heath has a metaphorical significance similar to that of the Fenlands and the Ouze as Swift develops them in his novel. Hardy’s extreme interest in the Napoleonic period, as evidenced especially in The Trumpet-Major (1880), also comes to mind when one reads of Tom Crick’s great interest in the French Revolution and in other historical events.

Swift’s subplot involving the Atkinson family and their enterprises is, on the one hand, suggestive of Arnold Bennett’s Anna of the Five Towns (1902), The Old Wives’ Tale (1908), and Clayhanger (1910), which are concerned with the people of the industrial and commercial area of Stratfordshire known as “The Potteries.” On the other hand, the Atkinson family subplot is overlaid with romantic, indeed with gothic, elements that remind one of Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland: Or, The Transformation (1798) and of some of the works of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, particularly her classic gothic novel, Frankenstein (1818).

Swift examines almost microscopically the development of a family in a place. He traces the interweaving of family traits and characteristics and the effects of locale upon members of a family that has long inhabited the same region. He attempts the sort of observation that William Faulkner mastered in his novels set in Jefferson, Mississippi, Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, which explored the Snopes, Compson, Sartoris, and Bundren families. For the stream of consciousness upon which Faulkner depends, however, Swift substitutes the historical narrative that Tom’s forced retirement motivates.

Bibliography

Brewer, J., and S. Tillyard. “History and Telling Stories: Graham Swift’s Waterland,” in History Today. XXXV (January, 1985), pp. 49-51.

Christian Science Monitor. LXXVI, March 28, 1984, p. 30.

Clemons, Walter. “A Swift Arrival,” in Newsweek. CV (June 24,1985), p. 74.

Gorra, Michael. Review in The Nation. CCXXXVIII (March 31, 1984), p. 392.

Kirkus Reviews. LII, January 1, 1984, p. 15.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. April 1, 1984, p. 1.

The Nation. CCXXXVIII, March 31, 1984, p. 392.

New Statesman. CVI, October 7, 1983, p. 26.

Newsweek. CIII, April 30, 1984, p. 74.

Prescott, Peter S. Review in Newsweek. CIII (April 30, 1984), p. 74.

Pritchard, William H. Review in The New York Times Book Review. March 25, 1984, p. 9.

Wood, Michael. Review in The New York Review of Books. XXXI (August 16, 1984), p. 47.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXV, January 13, 1984, p. 64.

The Wall Street Journal. CCIII, March 28, 1984, p. 30.