Key themes
- History as a story we tell ourselves — and its unreliability
- The Fens as a landscape of slow accumulation and occasional disaster
- A teacher's crisis and the family secrets it unearths
About this book
Tom Crick, a history teacher who is about to lose his job, tells his class the story of the Fens — the flat, watery landscape of East Anglia — and of the events of his own past that have shaped him. Swift's formally inventive novel interweaves personal history with natural history, asking what history is and whether it teaches anything.
Published in 1983, Waterland was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Guardian Fiction Prize. Swift grew up in South London but researched the Fens extensively. It is one of the most taught A-level novels in England.
Discussion questions
- Tom Crick tells his class that he will teach them 'real' history — his own — rather than the curriculum. What is Swift saying through this pedagogical rebellion — about what history is supposed to teach and what personal history actually teaches?
- The Fens is central to the novel's argument — a landscape made by human intervention, easily returned to water. How does Swift use this geography — as symbol, as character, or as something that refuses to be simply decoded?
- The novel interweaves the personal and the historical across many time periods. How does Swift manage this complexity — and does it always serve the novel's argument?
- Tom's wife Mary has been sectioned after a religious breakdown. How does this backstory develop across the novel — and what does it say about what people cannot survive?
- Waterland is a celebrated A-level text. What does it offer students at 16-18 that they would not find in more conventional historical fiction?
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