Waterland

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This is more of a collage, disparate elements of different narratives being brought together to make a new picture out of material from the past. Crick thinks he is curating all the different elements of his multiple timelines—but, in his case, it seems to be the outcome not of artistic control, but of a desperate need to discover meanings. He’s sitting in the sunny space between the chicken coop and the kitchen door, where Mother stands, in her apron. The characters were also really engaging, you come to understand their motivations, histories and relationships.

The narrator, a history teacher named Tom Crick, is about to be forced into retirement and, though he has personal grief of his own to contend with, we feel that, more than anything else, it is the age in which he lives, an age that denies history any place in the education system, that Crick grieves for most.Tom is appalled and confused, and one of the first things he does is put right his lie about who had been the father of Mary’s child. He knows that they are too important to him, fill a space in his life he never describes as having been brought about by his childlessness. This is a sophisticated literary work but also a gripping and twisted story of family, dynasty and trauma. e. the whole novel—which purports to be written at this same time, seems more and more to reveal a crazy-seeming determination to prove that all of this was out of his control, that there was nothing he could do. He, his mentally challenged brother Dick, and their friend Freddie Parr are all in love with the same woman.

Nearly forty years later, his son Tom, a history teacher, is driven by a bizarre marital crisis and the provocation of one of his students to forsake the formal teaching of history—and tell stories . Postmodernism promotes many of the same beliefs as modernism, but it does not see these things negatively. He also knows, apparently that if he were to take a bottle of the special brew he can find in the house and offer it to Freddie, it wouldn’t be difficult for Freddie to end up in the water.

But it isn’t why I thought this was one of the best novels I had ever read, which has much more to do with the way Swift tells it. According to Crick, both of these families played key roles in shaping the area where Crick is from. The overarching question asked by the narrator is why do some people have such a need to study history and to tell, and be told, stories.

Tom Crick, fifty-two years old, has been history master for some thirty years in a secondary school in Greenwich.What he forgets, however, is that humans need stories to live well, with others and with nature, and that, when the progressives bulldoze their way through what they think of as the redundant past, what they are really doing is stealing from others a set of narratives, and a way of life, that is, for them, the vivid present, that is: tradition.