I'd been thinking of something more general on water in literature.
When originally planning this blog, it hadn't been my intention to be so maudlin. Which was precisely the feeling I'd been hoping to capture. These were miserable cycling conditions and I began to feel a clammy East Anglian melancholy entering my soul. Worse yet, slicks of snot kept slipping out of my nose and my hands were red and numb in the cold air. It hadn't rained much recently, but it was still muddy, and my progress was marked by splashes and hisses. At once a philosophical meditation on the meaning of history and a gothic family saga, Waterland is a tightly interwoven novel that entertains as it provokes.Even the path was wet, when I took it. The novel also includes digressions on such off-beat topics as the sex life of the eel, the history of land reclamation, the history of the River Ouse, and the nature of phlegm. These events are set against a background of some of the great events in history, such as World War I and World War II. It includes a family history going back to the eighteenth century and such lurid topics as murder, suicide, abortion, incest, and madness. Tom's tale of the fens is sometimes lurid. The structure of the novel, which frequently moves back and forth in time, also suggests the fluidity of the interaction between past and present. The traumatic events of his adolescence reach forward in time to influence the present. These stories form the substance of the novel, which takes place mainly in two time frames: the present, and the year 1943, when Tom Crick is fifteen years old. Faced with a class of bored and rebellious students, he scraps the traditional history curriculum and tells them stories of the fens instead.
He is a man who is keenly interested in ideas about the nature and purpose of history. Tom is facing a personal crisis, since he is about to be laid off from his job and his wife has been admitted to a mental hospital. It is narrated by Tom Crick, a middle-aged history teacher. British novelist Graham Swift's Waterland (London, 1983 New York, 1984) is a complex tale set in eastern England's low-lying fens region.
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