“Waterland” is a novel that is deeply concerned with the nature of the past. It begins with Thomas Crick, who has dedicated his life’s work to history by “making a profession out of the past”. He is a history teacher who is soon to be let go due to a cutting back of the history department at the school where he teaches. Thomas sees recording history as collecting stories, “Perhaps history is just story telling.” He is obsessed with understanding the nature of history. The book circles Crick's childhood as he suffers various tradegies, including a botched abortion his girlfriend suffers and the death of his brother.
The choosing of his profession as a historian can be directly linked with Thomas’s obsession with the past. With his mind constantly upon important times in history such as the French Revolution, it is inevitable that he will often ruminate on his own individual past. John Brewer and Stella Tillyard said “ruminating on the nature of history is one of the occupational diseases of the historian”
Throughout the entire novel, various forms of historiography are used, regional history (the fenlands), natural history (anguilla anguilla), geographical history (eastern England), political history (Earnest Atkinson) and of course autobiography. Thomas feels that it is impossible to give a perfect account of history, it is an “impossible thing: the attempt to give an account, with incomplete knowledge, of actions themselves undertaken with incomplete knowledge.”
He is obsessed by the question why. Throughout “Waterland” Thomas constantly asks himself that same question, leading him on to an endless number of new questions which when answered only bring more. Yet he feels that it is the most important question of all, as it leads to the past and when answered reveals truth. “Though it gets more difficult the more you ask it, thought it gets more inexplicable, more painful, and the answer never seems to come any nearer, don’t try to escape this question why”. Thomas Crick is stuck in a cycle of “whywhywhy” and he is taken in circles. Ian Brinton said “Waterland is a novel about history and mans insatiable curiosity to ask the question why”
It is Thomas’s desire for the truth that also leads to his obsession with the past. His attempts at discovering the murderer of Freddy Parr , a boy whos body he discovers at the beginning of the novel, shows the lengths he will go to discover truth. To him the truth is incredibly important, to know the facts, to come closer to the perfect account of events. Gustave Flaubert once wrote “Ineptitude consists in wanting to reach conclusions.” In his constant seeking for the truth, one can see that even if he manages to reach the complete truth of his childhood, it will avail him nothing. His search will continue with the constant formation of new history: “The past will go on happening”.
And yet Thomas also attempts to escape the past by asking himself the question why. He believes you can do this by filling in the unknown facts in a story. He shows this in his conversation with his student Price “It helps to drive out fear. I don't care what you call it- explaining, evading the facts, making up meanings, taking a larger view, putting things into perspective, dodging the here and now, education, history, fairy tales,- it helps to eliminate fear” Julian Barnes said “History isn’t what happened, its what historians tell us happened” In this way there is the illusion that the past can be changed, and by telling stories we feel as if we can change past mistakes, and prevent the past from catching up with us.
Although Thomas spends much of the book confronting his past, he is actually trying to avoid it. The intuitive Price discovers this, by saying “explaining’s a way of avoiding the facts while you pretend to get near them” Through this we can see that although Thomas is telling the story of his past, he does not accept that it affects him and the person he is. He does this by viewing it very clinically. Yet it does affect him. Ian Brinton said “We cannot escape from our history and we need it in order to give some patterning to our everyday lives”
Graham Swift is also concerned with the Circularity of the past. He shows that history is cyclical by saying that as the men attempt to drain the Fenlands, they are always taking “one step forward, one step back.” In this way, history is always affecting the here and now, and as we create new history, our old history comes to claim us. Thomas Crick cannot see progress, he can only see the past endlessly repeated.
The way the book leaps back and forth from past to present, from one past to another, represents the fractured nature of history as Graham Swift sees it. His chapters are often connected by broken sentences, thus linking past and present, one past and another together. This shows the webbed and circular nature of the past. Ian Brinton said “This nightmare will never end as our present is completely interlinked with our past” It is the present that becomes the past, and it is the past that leads to what occurs in the present. Neither can exist without the other. In this way we can see that both are inextricably linked.
The idea of the cyclical nature of the past can be reinforced by the chapter “about the eel”. Although events occur to change Thomas’s life, the life of the eel goes on undisturbed. Natural History is perhaps the most powerful history of all, as it is a constant cycle that remains relatively undisturbed. “And they were still doing it, still accomplishing these vast atavistic circles when on a July day in 1940 Freddie Parr picked up out of a trap one of their number (which later escaped and lived perhaps to obey the call of the far Sargasso) and placed it in Mary Metcalf's navy blue knickers.”
The inescapable nature of the past is also reflected in Dick, Thomas’s retarded brother. He lives most of his life in the here-and-now, forgetting things easily. Yet as the novel progresses, he instigates several events, such as the murder of Freddy Parr. He is unable to forget these things, and it is this that makes him realise that the past is as important as the here-and-now. It is perhaps when he remembered his past that causes him to commit suicide at the end of the book. “His face is aquiver with un-Dick-like importunacy… He's made things happen; things have happened because of him… He’s stuck in the past.” Despite Dick’s stupidity and unawareness of the past, even he is inevitably caught up in it.
In “Waterland” history relies on the darker side of man’s nature and the evils that occur in this world. This is shown when Swift writes, “History begins only at the point where things go wrong; history is born only with trouble, with perplexity, with regret.” It is only the tragedies of life that make up the past in “Waterland” “it is precisely these surprise attacks of the Here and Now which, far from launching us into the present tense, which they do, it is true, for a brief and giddy interval, announce that time has taken us prisoner” The us of the word prisoner also helps convey the idea of the inescapable nature of the past. The idea of tragedy making up our past is reinforced here. “What is a history teacher? He's someone who teaches mistakes. While others say, Here's how to do it, he says, And here's what goes wrong” History focuses on what went wrong. Nobody goes through their life without some form of sadness in their lives. Thus becoming part of the past is inevitable.