Waterland by Graham Swift (AQA A-Level English Literature A): Revision Notes

Context & Writer's Techniques

Introduction to Waterland

Graham Swift's novel Waterland, published in 1983, emerged during Margaret Thatcher's first term as Prime Minister. The book appeared at a time of significant social and political upheaval in Britain, including the aftermath of the Falklands War in 1982, ongoing miners' strikes, and widespread nuclear anxiety. Through the story of the Crick family in the Fens, Swift creates a powerful critique of postmodern society's relationship with history and progress.

The novel uses the concept of drainage to symbolise England's post-industrial decline and the erosion of traditional communal narratives. Swift challenges what the critic Jean-François Lyotard called the growing incredulity towards metanarratives - the grand stories societies tell about themselves.

Historical context

The 1974 setting

The novel's primary timeframe is set in 1974, a year of crisis for Britain. This period saw the Oil Crisis, which caused economic turmoil and energy shortages across the country. The IRA bombing campaign was at its height, creating widespread fear and instability. At Gildsey Comprehensive School, where Tom Crick teaches history, these anxieties manifest in the school's pivot towards a Science of Life curriculum, reflecting a broader cultural shift away from humanities subjects.

This 1974 setting mirrors the Thatcherite enterprise culture that would dominate British politics in the 1980s when Swift was writing. The emphasis on science and progress over historical understanding echoes the political climate's focus on modernisation and economic efficiency, often at the expense of cultural memory and community values.

Historical flashbacks through the Fens

Swift's narrative reaches back through centuries of Fenland history, using the region as a microcosm for broader British historical patterns. The flashbacks include several key periods:

The 17th century: Cornelius Vermuyden's Dutch-engineered reclamation project transformed the Fens from marshland into arable farmland. However, this engineering triumph created flood-prone waterland, establishing a recurring theme of human efforts to control nature being ultimately futile.

The 19th century: The Atkinson family's Jubilee brewery represents the boom-and-bust cycle of industrial capitalism. This parallels the later Corn Laws crisis and their eventual repeal, showing how economic systems rise and fall in cycles rather than linear progress.

The French Revolution (1789-94): Ernest Atkinson's failed bid for Parliament connects to revolutionary ideals and their aftermath. The period's concept of time out of joint inspires Swift's exploration of how historical moments resonate across generations.

1980s themes and debates

Swift engages with several pressing concerns of the 1980s throughout the novel. Environmental debates about marsh restoration and land management reflect growing ecological consciousness. The character of Price voices apocalyptic fears about nuclear destruction, capturing the anxiety of the Cold War era.

Literary context

Historiographic metafiction

Waterland belongs to a tradition of historiographic metafiction - novels that combine historical narrative with self-conscious reflection on the storytelling process itself. This places Swift in dialogue with earlier experimental writers like Laurence Sterne, whose 18th-century novel Tristram Shandy pioneered digressive narrative techniques and metafictional asides. Similarly, William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury explored temporal collapse and fragmented storytelling, techniques Swift adapts for his exploration of Fenland history.

Historiographic metafiction challenges the boundary between history and fiction, suggesting that all historical accounts are constructed narratives rather than objective truth. Through Tom Crick's unreliable narration and constant self-questioning, Swift demonstrates how personal and collective histories are shaped by the teller's perspective and purposes.

Victorian and neovictorian influences

Swift's novel represents a neovictorian revival, consciously echoing and reimagining 19th-century literary traditions. The connections to Charles Dickens's Great Expectations are particularly strong, with both novels exploring themes of social mobility, failed ambitions, and the weight of the past on the present. The Pip/Magwitch relationship finds parallels in Tom and Dick's troubled brotherhood.

Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles provides another touchstone, particularly in Swift's fatalistic portrayal of the Fens and the sense of characters trapped by their environment and heredity. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness influences Swift's treatment of imperial drainage - both literal and metaphorical - and the darkness lurking beneath civilised surfaces.

Postmodern connections

Swift's work shares kinship with other postmodern novelists who blend historical research with experimental narrative forms. Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children similarly uses hybrid histories and magical realist elements to explore national identity. A.S. Byatt's Possession demonstrates Victorian archival fictions and the interplay between past and present stories.

The novel's classification as British magic realism elevates Swift's work beyond the minimalism of contemporaries like Martin Amis and Ian McEwan. This approach incorporates Fenland folklore - such as eels functioning as phallic totems - whilst challenging the Leavisite tradition of regionalism that championed straightforward realist fiction. Swift transforms his region into a global story-telling animal, demonstrating how local narratives connect to universal human concerns.

Critical reception

Waterland won the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1983 and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, establishing Swift as a major voice in contemporary British literature. Critics praised the novel's ambitious scope and innovative narrative techniques, recognising Swift's ability to make historiographical debates accessible and emotionally resonant through the Crick family's personal tragedies.

Writer's techniques

Nonlinear historiography

Swift structures Waterland as 55 chapters described as O-level lessons, mimicking the meandering paths of Fenland waterways. This structural choice reflects the novel's central argument about the nature of history and time. Rather than following a straightforward chronological sequence, Tom's narrative circles back on itself, revisits key moments from different angles, and moves fluidly between time periods.

Analepsis and prolepsis: Swift employs extensive flashbacks (analepsis) to explore the Crick family's history, including the Atkinson incest that shapes later generations and the various disasters that befall the family. He also uses flash-forwards (prolepsis), most notably in revealing Mary's baby-snatching before explaining her earlier abortions and the loss of her own child. The 1943 plot involving Freddie's drowning and Dick's dredger suicide over Mary's paternity lie is reframed multiple times through Tom's avuncular address beginning "Children...."

This rejection of chronology creates what Swift calls simultaneous watery time - a sense that past, present, and future exist together, flowing into one another like water through the Fens. The structure suggests that history is not a linear march of progress but a great waterwheel, constantly turning and recurring. Events echo across generations, patterns repeat, and the distinction between then and now becomes deliberately blurred.

Metafictional self-reflexivity

Tom Crick frequently interrupts his own narrative with asides that draw attention to the artificial nature of storytelling. His statement "This is a story, therefore it has a moral" parodies didactic history teaching, acknowledging that all narratives impose meaning on events rather than simply reporting them objectively.

The novel stages debates between competing views of history through Tom's conflict with Headmaster Lewis. Lewis champions the idea of progress - history as a forward march towards improvement. Tom, by contrast, argues for cyclicality, the notion that historical patterns repeat and that human nature remains fundamentally unchanged.

Through this self-reflexive technique, Swift encourages readers to question not just what stories we tell about history, but how and why we tell them. Tom's constant admission of his own unreliability - his acknowledgment that he shapes events to suit his narrative purposes - makes the novel an inquiry into truth itself.

Symbolic motifs

Eels: The eel functions as Waterland's most complex symbol, carrying multiple layers of meaning. Eels migrate from the Sargasso Sea to European rivers to breed, embodying ideas of fertility, return, and the cyclical nature of life. This migration pattern parallels the Crick family's incestuous relationships, particularly the revelation about Atkinson incest that repeats across generations.

Mary's multiple abortions create a counterpoint of sterility, highlighting the novel's tension between fertility and barrenness. The eel's life cycle defies linear progression, refusing neat narrative closure and reinforcing Swift's argument against teleological history - the idea that events move towards a predetermined end.

Waterland: The flood-prone Fenland marshes blur boundaries between categories that societies typically keep separate: living and dead, fact and myth, land and water, past and present. Windmills and dredgers represent human attempts to control nature's recurrence, but ultimately these efforts prove futile. The land periodically floods despite centuries of drainage work, demonstrating nature's power to resist human ordering.

Brewing and incest: The Atkinson Jubilee ale's fermentation process creates an extended metaphor for family degeneration and rebirth. Fermentation transforms raw materials through controlled decay, mirroring how family secrets and traumas transform across generations. The boom and eventual bust of the brewery business parallels the family's own rise and fall.

Linguistic registers

Swift's prose demonstrates remarkable versatility in shifting between different linguistic registers. Through free indirect discourse, the narrative voice fuses Tom's Cockney vernacular with elevated mythic grandeur. This technique allows Swift to move seamlessly between personal memory and universal themes.

The dialectal phonetics of the Fens, including dropped h's in speech (such as 'ell instead of hell), authenticate the novel's regional realism and ground its more experimental elements in a specific place and community. The vernacular voice captures the speech patterns of working-class Fenland communities, lending authority to Tom's account.

This authentic local voice contrasts sharply with Price's apocalyptic jargon about nuclear doom and scientific progress. Price speaks in the abstract language of modernity, whilst Tom's language remains rooted in physical reality and human experience. The tension between these registers reflects the novel's broader concern with competing ways of understanding the world - through progress narratives or through recurring human patterns.

Gothic postmodernism

Swift blends elements of traditional Gothic literature with postmodern philosophical concerns. Fenland's liminality - its status as an in-between space - evokes Freudian concepts of the uncanny, where familiar things become strange and threatening. The drowned body of Freddie keeps resurfacing, literally and figuratively, whilst Mary experiences visions of drowned babies that hallucinate her lost motherhood.

The novel draws on regional Gothic traditions, particularly the ghost stories of M.R. James set in the East Anglian landscape. However, Swift transforms these Gothic elements through postmodern ontological doubt - persistent questioning about the nature of reality and knowledge itself.

The Gothic elements serve Swift's larger purpose of unsettling confident narratives about progress and rationality. The ghosts and supernatural occurrences remind us of what Enlightenment thinking tried to drain away or bury - the irrational, the mysterious, the uncontrollable aspects of human experience. In this way, the Gothic becomes a tool for questioning modernity's claims about mastering nature and understanding the world.

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