Journal Entry 1 by goatgrrl from New Westminster, British Columbia Canada on Friday, July 29, 2005

Journal Entry 2 by goatgrrl from New Westminster, British Columbia Canada on Thursday, May 25, 2006

Set in the Cambridgeshire Fens of East Anglia, Waterland begins with a description by narrator Tom Crick of his childhood growing up in the fictional town of Gildsey, on the fictional River Leem (a tributary of the real-life Great Ouse), where his superstitious widower father Henry Crick is the keeper of the New Atkinson Lock. Tom lives in the lock-keeper's cottage with his father and his mentally disabled older brother, Dick. It's not uncommon for things to float down the river from the farms and towns upstream, but one day in July 1943 the unthinkable happens: the drowned body of a local boy, Freddie Parr, washes up against the iron sluice of the New Atkinson Lock.

The story flashes forward to the present. It's 1980 and Tom, having spent thirty-two years as a history teacher, is leaving his job -- notionally because the school is eliminating the history department, but really because of a scandal involving his wife Mary (Tom's childhood sweetheart from Gildsey), who has apparently stolen a baby. Although thirty-seven years separate the events of one part of the novel from those which take place in the other, Waterland explores the many connections, repetitions and echoes that occur throughout a life. In this way, the novel is a kind of sustained meditation on Why History Matters, and why -- while it may not benefit us to understand the choices and circumstances of our forefathers -- it may help us make sense of our own.

I noticed a funny connection/overlap between themes and events in Waterland and similar themes and occurences in Lesley Glaister's Honour Thy Father (also set in the Fens of East Anglia), which readers who enjoy this setting may be interested to explore.

You can read reviews of Waterland in the New York Times here. There's also a write-up on Waterland in the Literary Encyclopedia here, and a set of eNotes on the novel here. Waterland was shortlisted for the 1983 Booker Prize (it was beaten by J.M. Coetzee's Life & Times of Michael K). It was also awarded the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize (now known as the Royal Society of Literature's Ondaatje Prize) and the Premio Grinzane Cavour (Italy).

 

Journal Entry 3 by goatgrrl from New Westminster, British Columbia Canada on Friday, June 02, 2006

Mailed to my friends Liz and Sue in Ottawa, who enjoyed Lesley Glaister's Honour Thy Father, and I thought might enjoy this one.