Waterland (Masterplots II: British and Commonwealth Fiction Series)
At a glance:
- Author: Graham Swift
- First Published: 1983
- Type of Work: Novel of ideas
- Time of Work: The 1970’s, with flashbacks to the eighteenth century, the nineteenth century, and the first half of the twentieth century
- Setting: Greenwich, England, and the Fenlands of Norfolk near the River Leem
- Principal Characters: Tom Crick, Mary Metcalf Crick, Henry Crick, Dick Crick, Freddie Parr, Lewis Scott, Price, Thomas Atkinson, Sarah
- Genres: Long fiction, Problem novel
- Subjects: Teaching or teachers, History, 1970’s, Family or family life, Education or educators, Science or scientists, England or English people, Storytelling, Time, Secondary education, Retirement
- Locales: England, Norfolk, England, Greenwich, England
The Novel
Tom Crick, fifty-two years old, has been history master for some thirty years in a private secondary school in Greenwich, a point of zero degrees longitude, in a sense the place where, in a world that sets its clocks according to Greenwich Mean Time, time begins. Tom’s wife, Mary, also in her early fifties, has been married to Tom for as long as he has been teaching. Until shortly before the immediate action of the story, she has been working with the elderly in a home. She has given up that job.
The students in Tom’s school have grown increasingly...
[The entire page is 2092 words long]
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