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WaterLand
Graham Swift
Waterland is a story about nostalgia, about reliving the past rather than embracing the future. The book’s main character is, appropriately, a history teacher, Tom Crick. His future seems to be coming to an end since his wife descended the slippery slope of insanity, which resulted in her stealing a baby. He is now being forced into ‘retirement’ by his school because of his connection to this act of moral madness (does being close to madness rub off? Is it contagious?). As Tom faces his last few weeks of teaching he starts a new form of history lesson for his ‘children’ , his own history, that which has brought him here and will forever hold him for he cannot let it go.
What is it about this history that won’t let him leave it behind and escape it? Perhaps because he cannot find a future for himself other than the past – he teaches the past, he researches the past as a hobby, and above all he lives in his past. He married his childhood sweetheart, a move that has seemed to leave them both empty and unable to progress, for they both linger in those old unresolved memories – murder, death, innocence lost, madness, and grief.
Murder is our starting point – Tom’s friend, Freddie Parr is murdered. It is how we are introduced to this sorrowful history teacher, adrift in a world he doesn’t understand, we are introduced to him through death. And death swiftly becomes a theme throughout the novel, for as Tom relates his family’s history, so too must he relate the deaths of his ancestors and, more painfully, those of his family. His mother died when he was nine, Freddie Parr when he was a teenager and his brother, Dick Crick, shortly after. Only a few brief years later his father too perishes and Tom is alone, without family, except for his peculiar wife with her passionate and frightening extremes of temperament. Death is all Tom thinks about as he teaches his class, the death of a friend that led to the death of a brother, compounded by his own class’ nightmares of an impending nuclear apocalypse.
We could go as far as to call this all madness, for that is another very strong theme in the book. Even when Tom is first relating the history of the fens, so too he is relating a history of insanity, for is it not madness for men to think they can tame water? This unstoppable force that can so easily wash everything away and does so on occasion, and in this we can see a parallel with the World War that is raging during Tom’s adolescence, another seemingly unstoppable madness that could wash everything away before it. On a more personal level it seems Tom’s family have suffered their own fair share of distinctly batty relatives. This descent into genetic lunacy begins with the Atkinsons - who will eventually become tied to the Cricks through a downturn in their fortunes and marriage – Thomas Atkinson first shows the signs when he flies into a jealous rage and batters his wife Sarah resulting in her becoming a ghoulish figure who never speaks for the next fifty years of her life, but sits at a window and just watches. To superstitions minds she becomes a soothsayer, an Atkinson private Guardian Angel and even a fenland banshee when, after her death in 1874, a flood decimates the fens and her ghost is said to be wandering abroad.
Her sons might refute these strange tales, but the spectre of Sarah lingers over the Atkinsons, for it is hinted in the text that her sons are too fond of their daughters, that there is more than fatherly love in their hearts – something that will be realised in later generations. We continue down to Ernest Atkinson, great grandson of ill-fated Sarah and rebel. It is tempting to think that he burnt down the family brewery to spite those amongst the town of Gildsey who thought better of his father than him, who scorned his warnings about the First World War that was looming ahead. But if this was not a sign of the madness to be then we are soon to discover how deep the rot goes, for when the family fortunes are falling into tatters Ernest turns to his daughter and in her arms not only finds a companion, but a lover and possibly even the mother of his child. But at this point the Cricks enter the scene. Henry Crick marries Ernest’s daughter after suffering his own mental malady caused by the Great War. Henry Crick’s wife is pregnant but is it her husband’s child or is it Ernest’s?
There is a suggestion that the Atkinson madness (some might call it Sarah’s curse) has finally culminated with the immoral relations between father and daughter and the resulting offspring, which is Dick. Dick who is mentally handicapped, who can barely speak and above all, who is a calculating murderer. It is now we get our first, and perhaps only, sensation of evil in the novel for Dick is not educated, his father seems to fear educating him as though such a process with not help but create a greater danger, a greater threat to the family. Does he fear Dick or does he just know what he is capable of? When Tom reveals that he is convinced his brother killed Freddie Parr his father does not hesitate to believe him, does not even consider the possibility of him being wrong. Perhaps it is what he dreaded from the moment he set eyes on his son?
We could continue the theme of madness for many more pages and include the outrageous events of Armistice Day when the brewery burnt down and the townsfolk were incapable of preventing it so drunk were they on Ernest Atkinson’s beer or even Tom’s father’s last days of delirium. But the most important case of madness is that of Mary’s. What causes her malaise? It is the end of cycles. Throughout the novel we are shown history repeats, mistakes repeat, but we are also shown other cycles, the eels breeding cycle for example, Mary’s feminine cycle which she divulges to Tom at length (even perhaps Dick’s motorcycle, which he is said to have been unnaturally found of?) the cycle of nature, the cycle of the world. But Mary’s monthly cycles are ending, no more chances of children, no more future. This seems to bring on the despair that results in madness, which finally destroys Mary. For so many years she has struggled with the knowledge that her only chance of having a child was lost when she aborted the baby she had conceived with Tom, a baby which she blames for Freddie Parr’s death, because she told Dick it was Freddie’s to save Tom, and Dick later murdered Freddie presumably out of jealousy. And through this all Tom wanders as a passive observer. He is not a man of action, he is a watcher, he is a thinker. But doesn’t this passivity only allow things to go on? It certainly doesn’t help because he waits too long to tell the police that Dick is a murderer and this drives Mary to do drastic things; to abort her child, an abortion that leaves her emotionally and physically damaged for life. And it is Tom’s silence in later years when he can see something is not right with his wife that allows her once more to fall into madness, into a place she will never return from.
Why? Why does Tom tell us his history? Because he likes to explain, explanations are comforting for Tom, when he explains, when he finds the wheels within wheels, it makes him feel better. But while he is lost in a world of excuses and reasons the world around him disintegrates without him even noticing.
Waterland is a fascinating book that intrigues with its twists and turns, with its suspense and its climax. Occasionally it is easy to guess what is about to happen, and this can be irritating when you have solved the puzzle and yet there are ten more pages of description before the author reveals you are right. But I think what the book most expresses, what it is trying to achieve is that life is forever repeating, that we should realise that our history is a model for the future, and that is not always a good thing. Waterland is also very sad, it is about a man who has lost everything and there is no happy ending to console us, but you get the impression that if we returned to Tom a year later, or maybe more, everything would have changed again, because the cycle keeps turning, history moves on. How can there be an ending when history never ends? And after all the history and the side stories we find Tom is like the eels he talks about so much, we have witnessed a part of his life, part of the cycle, but any minute he is going to slip away and continue his journey out of sight of us and we will not know where he goes or if he will come back.
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