Waterland

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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. She means that the local kids’ stories about Dick’s huge penis turned out to be true… but, she also tells him, Dick didn’t know really how conception works. Even before the arrival of his American suppliers of bourbon, he was often drunk enough for his wife to have to take over all his signalling duties for hours at a time. The next time, she has a bucket, and he swims over, holding a struggling eel firmly enough for it not to escape. So there's no escaping it: even if we miss the grand repertoire of history, we yet imitate it in miniature and endorse, in miniature, its longing for pretense, for feature, for purpose, for content.

Postmodernism promotes many of the same beliefs as modernism, but it does not see these things negatively. Before the box was even opened, he had thought that he had killed Freddie for fathering a child that was really his. It’s a world in which local men make a living from whatever comes their way, from well-rationed American airmen to the eels swimming downstream.What Crick doesn’t say, because he wouldn’t be so lacking in taste, is that there’s a wife who knows how to cope. I decided to read this 1983 novel in four sections, writing about what I had read in each section before reading further. In other words, Swift isn’t being one of those authors who, for effect, make their narrators hold back some information for no reason that makes any plausible motivational sense.

Tom surmises all this because after seeing Mary, he had noticed a beer bottle of a very particular type floating downstream, towards where the body had ended up. Dick’s oversized penis—the young Crick’s worry that she might not have been telling the truth about what he had or had not been able to do with her—and the insistently phallic significance of the eels in these two stories, only seem to make it clear that nothing is clear. The speculative, piecemeal drainage of the Fens was an aspect of the region’s history I knew nothing of before I read this novel. He doesn’t need to, because it’s clear that whatever he had been trying to do with his ‘children,’ it had worked. This last is independent-minded and eccentric enough to be thought of as a ‘wise man’ (Crick’s father’s words, I think), and he poaches wildfowl which the other two spirit away to airfields up the railway line where bomber crews would pay for them with bourbon and anything else they could supply.

And that, after Tom appeared to have won an underwater swimming contest, Dick dived in and swam underwater for so long that they had all thought he’d drowned? A corollary question, which has always mystified me, is why do some people have no urge to study history. It isn’t, of course, but it might look that way to somebody who, through his own choices, has brought about something life-changing. His ‘special’ brew, created for the Jubilee, turns the town’s celebrations into a drunken farce which brings about, accidentally or deliberately, the burning down of the brewery, that great symbol of Atkinson power. Mary had been a mystery then and, following the flat, featureless years of their Fenland marriage, she’s a mystery to him now.