Rainer, Peter (6 November 1992). "MOVIE REVIEW: The Past Flows Poetically Through 'Waterland' ". Los Angeles Times . Retrieved 20 March 2020. Is history simply a record of past mistakes? How do religious beliefs fit into the picture? Can knowledge of past events make us better people? With knowledge can we make better decisions? Sometimes yes. Sometimes no. Life without curiosity is a dead end. If you have curiosity, how can one stop asking why, why, why as life unrolls? If you are a person who incessantly asks why, the need for history is a given. 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. I'm not kidding. This book gets a little ridiculous. It's a semi-Postmodern text examining the difficulty of writing Realism in a Postmodern era, but it goes off on romantic (not Romantic) tangents about natural history and cultural history and all, in a very Julian Barnes ( A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters) way. Then it goes into creepy, Stephen King-esque scenes with the children exploring the two great draws in life: sex and death. (The only constants, heh.) I ended up wishing either Stephen King or Julian Barnes had written it, and focused on it - as it is, the tension is uneasy, and yet uneasy in a way that really contributes to the novel and its aims. Although I do love how the idea of storytelling is played with in this novel: the idea that we can't bear reality without the stories we create to endow it with meaning, because otherwise reality is too strong, too harsh, and will overpower us. But again, that's very Barnes. Swift was acquainted with Ted Hughes [4] and has himself published poetry, some of which is included in Making an Elephant: Writing from Within (2009).

Higdon, David Leon, "Double Closures in Postmodern British Fiction: The Example of Graham Swift," in Critical Survey, Vol. 3, No. 1, 1991, pp. 88-95. Higdon analyzes Swift's use of closure (that is, how he ends his novels) in Waterland and other works. He concludes that Swift synthesizes traditional endings with a postmodernist open-endedness. There is an excitement, a sense of tension that builds in the novel. You want to know more and more and more. A sentence is started and then left hanging. You know exactly what was to be said but is then not said. This writing style is unusual; I have not run into it before. It’s good, very good. It draws your attention, keeps you alert and adds suspense. There is an underlying satirical tone that has you questioning what is implied. The prose is thought provoking. These objections, however, make the novel sound unduly glum. In fact, Waterland consistently absorbs one by virtue of its intellectual play, its sophisticated way of revealing plot, and its witty style. It is simply that for a novel with such deeply wrenching events, the narrative betrays little passion about those events. That could be a defect of its singular virtue, though, for this is one of those rare novels whose fidelity to their conceptual design is so complete that their manifold details are all conscripted in the service of the pedagogical point.

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Mainly, however, it was the descriptions of the Fens: "a landscape which, of all landscapes, most approximates to Nothing". A vast empty place inhabited by willow-the-wisps, potato-heads and a people filled with "phlegm", "mucus" and "slime" by the dank air. Kennedy, Maev (10 March 2009). "Graham Swift joins angling partner Ted Hughes in British Library archive". The Guardian . Retrieved 10 March 2009. Bir tarih öğretmenimiz var ve onun kişisel tarihi, ailevi tarihi, meslek olarak tarihçiliği –tarihte kesintiye gidiyoruz- ve dünyanın sonunun tarihi özel bir anda eşzamanlı olarak çökmek ya da kitaba yaraşır bir şekilde söylemek gerekirse batmak üzeredir ama hiç batmamış olsak da biliriz ki batma eylemi bir çırpıda gerçekleşmez, zamana yayılır, ağır ağır gerçekleşir, yardım çığlıkları, ağıtlar, küfürler ve söylenmeler batış anına eşlik eder. Son kertede çırpınmadan geriye determinizm kalır, olması gereken olur ya da kitaba uygun bir şekilde söylemek gerekirse akacak kan bacak arasında durmaz. Ama yine biliriz ki “bebeklerin sevgiden neşet etmesi” gibi tarihte hikayelerden neşet eder. The first attempts to drain the fens were made by the ancient Romans. In the sixteenth century, Queen Elizabeth I also wished to undertake the project to improve the region's agricultural yields. But it was not until the seventeenth century that drainage of the fens took place on a large scale. This was a massive engineering project that caused enormous ecological changes in the region and took several decades to accomplish. The impetus came from the Duke of Bedford and wealthy investors in London who wished to increase the value of the land they owned, which they could then sell at a profit. Waterland exhibits the subgenre Historiographic Metafiction. Canadian academic Linda Hutcheon coined the term in 1987 in her essay 'Beginning to Theorize the Postmodern'. Historiographic metafictions self-consciously draw attention to how history and the practice of writing history are a construction. History is a narrative created by people which means historical documents can have biases and inaccuracies according to who wrote the documents, or whether such documents have been preserved in time.

Tomorrow (2007) once again adopted a South London setting and an intense interior monologue to unravel a saga of family secrets at the moments before their imminent revelation. This time, the internal voice was that of 49-year old Paula, speaking as if to the teenage children asleep in the next room. With her husband asleep by her side, the novel relied on the tension of what the coming ‘tomorrow’ of the title would bring for the family. How would family secrets be revealed and how would the secrets be disclosed? 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 plot of the novel revolves around loosely interwoven themes and narrative, including the attraction of the narrator's brother to his girlfriend/wife, a resulting murder, a girl having an abortion that leaves her sterile, and her later struggle with depression. As an adult woman, she kidnaps a baby. 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. Metafiction refers to when a text makes the reader aware that they are reading a fictional text. It is self-referential. The story might examine the very means of storytelling itself. The teaching of history has broadened and now includes the history of people and topics formerly ignored, such as women and minorities. There is a fierce debate in the history profession about methods of studying history.

The Norwich, Gildsey, Peterborough railway was introduced primarily as a passenger service but, by enabling cheap freight transportation, also contributed to the emergence of rail as the principal artery of agricultural trade in mid-nineteenth century East Anglia, overtaking inland waterways, with radical implications for the region’s economy and socio-political fabric. However, the abortion is also botched and leaves Mary infertile. She will never be able to have children. This turn of events explains why Mary stole a baby as a middle-aged woman. The trauma of never being able to have children has impacted her more and more throughout the years. This has deeply affected her mental health.

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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. This personal narrative is set in the context of a wider history, of the narrator's family, the Fens in general, and the eel. The left side of my brain admired the novel’s ambition and scope. The right side of my brain remained detached and I was unable to stay immersed. Waterland is a 1983 novel by Graham Swift, set in the Fenland of eastern England. It won the Guardian Fiction Prize, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Children, only animals live entirely in the Here and Now. Only nature knows neither memory nor history. But man - let me offer you a definition - is the storytelling animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting marker-buoys and trail-signs of stories. He has to go on telling stories. He has to keep on making them up. As long as there's a story, it's all right. Even in his last moments, it's said, in the split second of a fatal fall - or when he's about to drown - he sees, passing rapidly before him, the story of his whole life.”

As critics and reviewers have pointed out there are similarities with Great Expectations and Absalom, Absalom: post-modern retellings which question narrative itself. Of course the material of the stories refuses to be shaped by them. There’s a great deal of water (this is the Fens!) and lots of water related motifs and symbols. It also fairly deftly jumps between the quaint and the macabre. This is an amalgam of lots of ideas which actually works rather well. And don’t forget the eels!

Waterland - Key takeaways

Abortion is legal if performed in the first twenty-eight weeks of pregnancy. This law was established by the 1967 Abortion Act. For centuries the fens of eastern England were vast desolate marsh areas. Patches of firm ground were interspersed with rivers, pools, and reed-beds. The rivers could be navigated only by shallow-bottomed boats. The fens harbored abundant bird life and sea life, especially eels (as Waterland makes clear). There’s this thing called progress. But it doesn’t progress. It doesn’t go anywhere. Because as progress progresses the world can slip away. It’s progress if you can stop the world slipping away. My humble model for progress is the reclamation of land. Which is repeatedly, never-ending retrieving what it lost. A dogged and vigilant business. A dull yet valuable business. A hard, inglorious business. But you shouldn’t go mistaking the reclamation of land for the building of empires.”