47 pages • 1 hour read
Graham SwiftWaterland
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1983A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “About the Stars and the Sluice”
Narrator Tom Crick begins this flashback sequence by ruminating on his father’s trust in people: “And don’t forget […] whatever you learn about people, however bad they turn out, each one of them has a heart” (1). Tom’s father is also highly superstitious and an excellent storyteller. Tom then ponders on a night when he was 10; he and his 14-year-old brother Dick set eel traps in their homeland in the middle of the Fens in East England with their father, Henry. Their mother died six months before, resulting in Henry’s turn toward superstition and the occult.
Henry is a lock-keeper on the River Leem in charge of raising the sluice. Tom describes in detail the various scenarios involved in this job, then leaps ahead six years to another midsummer’s night, this time in 1943, when a dead body gets caught in the sluice. It’s a boy named Freddie Parr.
Chapter 2 Summary: “About the End of History”
Many years later Tom addresses his high school students in his last days as their history teacher. His leaving is not by choice but because of an unfortunate incident involving his wife.
A surly student, Price, “asserted that history was a ‘fairy tale’” (6) and that only the present and future matter. Tom doesn’t expect him to understand, but instead of telling the story of the French Revolution as planned, he opts to impart a “fairy-tale” of his own to the class.
Chapter 3 Summary: “About the Fens”
Tom delves into the past to give the origin of the Fens, “a low-lying region of eastern England, over 1,200 square miles in area” and its “shallow, shifting waters” (8). Claiming the land’s alterations happened “not so long ago” (9), he gives accounts of its evolution from the year 870 to the present, simultaneously weaving his family’s relation to this “waterland” into the story by recounting his ancestors’ deep connection with the land and how they were forced to adapt to its constant changes.
The Cricks also contended with the Atkinson family, who only saw the land as a way to make a profit. As the Cricks were intrinsically linked to the land, physically and emotionally, they stayed but used various means to escape its harsh lifestyle. Tom ends this part of the saga in the year 1922, when “the Atkinson empire […] is in decline” (20), his parents marry, and his father is appointed keeper of the Atkinson Lock.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Before the Headmaster”
Tom is offended when Headmaster Lewis uses a feeble excuse to fire him and tells his class the school was once “a new ship bound for the Promised Land. Lewis, our doughty captain” (23) is “no longer captain. He’s become—a figurehead” (24). Tom says Lewis has no real interest in his teachers or he would have cared about Tom’s well-being, as his real reason for dismissal involves a personal matter.
Chapter 5 Summary: “A Bruise Upon a Bruise”
Tom revisits the incident involving the dead boy on the Fens. His dad and brother Dick find the body, and after much difficulty they hoist it from the water with a boat-hook. Dad attempts to resuscitate the lad but is unsuccessful. Though the boy was an acquaintance named Freddie Parr, Dick “shows no dismay (but what can you tell of the feelings of a potato-head?)” (32).
Police arrive, and after ascertaining Freddie drowned after drinking alcohol, they transport his body to the mortuary, but not before Tom notices “that the bruise on Freddie’s right temple, which is a dull yellow at the edges, was not made by the boat-hook” (34).
Chapters 1-5 Analysis
The opening chapters introduce some of the book’s key themes and symbolism. One of the most prominent themes is dependence on coping mechanisms. After losing his beloved wife, Henry turns to superstition for direction. He orders his life based on “magical and occult” (1) ways and relies on anecdotes of idealized nature and unconditional love to console his lonely heart. Chapter 2 also highlights Tom’s dependence on stories, but his contain historical fact, not his father’s “fairy-tale words”(1). For this reason, Tom is an appropriate choice as history teacher and first-person narrator. Dick’s description as a potato-head without feelings hints at a mental disability. He simply works, like a machine, and doesn’t seek answers or companionship. Yet Swift deftly endows each of these characters with a different aspect of humanity—Henry, the heart; Tom, the mind; Dick, the body—requiring them to rely on each other for support, as well as on their coping mechanisms for a sense of wholeness.
Chapter 3 introduces a main symbol: the waterland, or the Fens, home to the Cricks and an everchanging, marshy land that’s almost impossible to control, much like its inhabitants’ unstable lives. Fens people also become “amphibious,” neither water nor land people, implying their ability to adapt to their surroundings. The Fens also foreshadows future tragedies when Swift describes it as a place of “realism; fatalism” where “melancholia and self-murder are not unknown” (17).
Another theme, the effects of time, is displayed in Chapter 4, both when the conundrum of passion versus mediocrity arises and when the narrative shifts from one time period to another. Tom retains his fervor for teaching over time, while Lewis opts for indifference as headmaster. Lastly, the discovery of Freddie’s corpse in Chapter 5 foreshadows a dark truth that Tom first hints at when he sees the odd wound. The theme that curiosity is essential to answering important life questions is also highlighted when Tom’s detective instinct compels him to investigate Freddie’s death.
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