In Graham Swift's novel, Waterland, Tom Crick is a teacher at a local high school in the Fens country of East Anglia

and he is about to lose his job. The real reason is that the headmaster has been steering the school towards the sciences and sees little value in the humanities, which houses Cricks department of History. After Crick refuses to step down, the school informs he must after his wife is arrested for stealing a baby. The shame brought on Crick is reflected onto the school and thus he is made to retire early. But before he goes, he tells a story. He tells the story of the local Fens; going back almost 240 years as he tells of the ways the people over the years have tried to drain them. He tells his own story about growing up during World War Two and how he met his wife, Mary. This is a major sub-plot as it explains why she stole the baby. It details their courtship as teenagers, their family backgrounds, and the murder of Freddie by Cricks brother, Dick, because Dick thought that Freddie was the father of the baby Mary was carrying. Because of her strict religious father, Mary tries to do a self-abortion, but it failed so she and Crick (the childs father) went to see an elderly woman who performed an abortion that left Mary sterile. After all these years, Mary has regretted the abortion and her sterility, prompting her to go insane and to steal the baby. There is also the back story of Cricks mothers family and their rise to prominence and relative power in the neighborhood. Their slow accumulation of land, and their brewery as yet another sub-plot that helps and remains tied to the main story of Cricks inevitable dismissal from the school. These many subplots interrelate and help bring the novel to its conclusion. The students respond to these history lessons in ways differently than they have to other history lessons. They begin to understand the importance of history and their own place in it. The story is about the inability to be separate from history. The irony of the headmaster to assume it is unimportant shows his gross ignorance in his blind following of the sciences as useful. He does not realize that because of history, advances were made to get him to where he was. History is time, and time cannot be stopped, so history cannot be stopped.

Themes. Graham Swifts novel, Waterland, is an amazing story filled with startling characters, and dark actions. It is filled with a foreboding sense of finality and stagnation. But within the pages, Swift begins to ask questions about the society of the modern world

and to question not only past values, but the value that is placed on past values. The logical fallacy of ad antiquitatem (the acceptance of something simply because it has been done before) is prevalent throughout the novel, and draws all of the following themes together. History/Time: History and time are both the same and different themes within Graham Swifts novel, Waterland. The theme of History emphasizes the inevitable passage of time, while the theme of time emphasizes the inevitable accumulation and participation in history. The two are linked, but separate themes as they dance to a careful tune artfully woven throughout the novel. It is also one of the more obvious themes. Sexuality: As with many novels, sexuality comes into play as people are the driving force behind the action. The characters question the role of sexuality and fight against sexual repression even as they conform to it in various ways. Sexuality is also an obvious theme in Waterland. However, it is a poignant one and well worth considering. Family values: Going hand in hand with sexuality, family values is a theme in Waterland as the characters fight their way through families broken by betrayal, incest, and murder. What makes a good family? What is family? How far will family go to protect and harm in the name of love? Swift raises these questions even as he begins to answer them. But inevitably there is not final, ultimate conclusion that can extend beyond the characters themselves. Utility vs. Pleasure: this theme ties into the themes of history, time, and sexuality. As Crick faces the disregard of the headmaster towards History, the headmaster seems unaware of his own place within time and how his own thoughts and actions are directed by history. He cannot see the usefulness of the history as compared to science. Science will advance forward while history is just looking at the past. However, he fails to realize that by moving forward, history is created. It is also ironic that in his quest for scientific enlightenment, he represses the intellectual pursuit of history. This carries over into sexuality because the characters are forced to look at the practical side of sex, reproduction, in contrast to the simple pleasure of it. Marys abortion highlights this theme.
This is the challenge of Waterland (1983). From the earliest pages we are aware that this is a lecture, almost a sermon, as much as a story, heightened in the urgency of its telling by the exigent circumstances in the life of the retiring history teacher, Tom Crick. After 32 years as a history teacher, and now facing the shut-down of the history department at his school and a cataclysm in his marriage--after his heretofore stalwart wife is given a child by God'--is being

retired for personal reasons by his headmaster. In response, Mr. Crick puts aside his well-honed lectures on the French Revolution and begins to instruct his students in the awful way that history intrudes in the present and the equally horrible fact that the Here and Now is like a knife blade that easily and unceremoniously rips into the fabric of history. His story (and his history) is told as if in a fever of confession and supplication, but the lecture is yet much more; it is also a protest, an attempt at vindication, and a defiant attempt to stand up for the enduring value of explanation before it is too late. It is a fascinating story, engrossingly told, involving the entire history of the Fenlands of East Anglia, but most particularly concerning the Atkinson family--farmers, brewers and shippers in the Fens over four generations--and their humble neighbors, the Cricks. (The narrator, himself a history teacher, is a Crick and the son of the lock and sluice-keeper on the river Leem, Henry Crick and his late wife, Helen Atkinson.) It is a mysterious tale of gothic coloring and remarkable suspense: remarkable especially since we are told early on who done it, but are carried along by the history teachers fervor in pursuit of the niggling whywhywhy of the sad, consequential events. This pursuit leads us with Mr. Crick back to the rise of the Atkinson family to prominence in local business (the brewery of a distinct and sometimes magical ale) and civic affairs (the drainage and maintenance of the Fenlands and water-ways)-- through various digressions into geologic time and the life cycle of European fresh-water eels--to the eventual decline and fall of their (and the British?) empire, unto the tragic events of murder and suicide which occur during and just after WWII, and which compel the contemporary crisis of the novel. The characters of the story, just so the events of their lives, range from the quaint to the macabre; including progressive men of ideas and superstitious townsfolk; a catatonic relic of abuse and subsequent veneration; a brainless moron of considerable strength and deftness of hand; and even a recent if not modern witch (Children, I told you it was gothic!). The events of their lives also range from the commonplace but consequential (single acts of impetuous violence with dire consequences) told with a nostalgic charm and ironic forgiveness, to the mundane but magical (a beer brewed with incredible potency), to those knife thrusts of reality (the Here and Now) which take on a decidedly macabre aspect in the fact as much as in the telling. All of this plus incest, suicide and murder: What an extraordinary range of exposition! The novel is structured in a seeming hodge-podge of digressions and voices, which can be confusing at first. But once we realize the logic of the heteroglossic (post-modern?) form, I think it goes more smoothly. The narrative is actually a composite of impromptu lectures to the class

(signaled always and often by direct address, Children); a series of transcribed conversations with the rebellious student, Price, who may be the instigator of the teachers abrupt revolution in curriculum, and with the headmaster and friend (which are rendered consistently and traditionally in quotation marks); and oblique but lengthy references to the work-in-progress, A History of the Fenlands of East Anglia (which we eventually learn Crick is working on). This amalgam of sources allows some changes of narrative pace and even of tense to occur without toppling our sense of dramatic unity. It also gives the book a decidedly modern, even post-modern, aspect. Once we realize this structure, too late for some no doubt, the narration flows rather well, though not always smoothly.* For, those sections of impromptu classroom sermonizing have a stopnstart jerkiness of incessant qualification and self-editing that inhibits the flow, but not the development, of Cricks ideas. By the same token, although this jerkiness does rather skillfully reflect the importunate, even desperate, state of the speakers mind, we are glad for the intervening chapters of fluid prose and occasional dialogues.

Whatever else he is, Crick is a character one can empathize with, (How many modern novels present characters so alien as to be unrecognizable as human, to say nothing of sympathetic?) and his situation and ad-libbed response to it are such as we can find understandable, if somewhat bizarre. And that is a pleasure. I believe it is also essential to Swifts overall theme. For, as much as Waterlandcan be considered a reflection, even a disquisition on History, embedded within an actual history, it is also a plea for the need and the art of story tellingfrom myths and fairytales, to histories and disquisitions, and also to novels (even in their conventional form). Waterland is not primarily an argument for novels of character and substance, though it is this as well; it is primarily an example of such! It is a thoroughly modern example of an old-fashioned novel of character and ideas. It is a character-driven novel with a didactic purpose: viz. to plead the case for itself against the impatient and careless rebels of modern literature who would eschew character, plot and perspective the bugbears of History in favor of immediacy in such as Flash fictionthe keen blade of the Here and Now. His is a cautionary voice, a mature voice and in 1983 a lonely voice which warns against a too fanatic rebellion as well as against a too nave progressivism. Its progress if you can stop the world slipping away. My humble model for progress is the reclamation of land . . .But you shouldnt go mistaking the reclamation of land for the building of empires.

The didactic purpose of the novel makes the trope of the teacher at wit's end both clever (subtle) and effective (not too subtle). But it is the overall theme and the organization of themes and means of their exposition that makes this an excellent novel. It is technically brilliant. There will be criticism of some aspects of the novel and rightly so. But Im sure its humanism and accessibility will outweigh its flaws and make it acceptable to just about everyone. And the pathos of the human story may make it a favorite for many.