Waterland (Cyclopedia of Literary Characters)
At a glance:
- Author: Graham Swift
- First Published: 1983
- Type of Work: Novel
- Type of Plot: Novel of ideas
- Time of Work: The 1970’s, with flashbacks to the eighteenth, nineteenth, and earlier twentieth centuries
- Setting: Greenwich, England, and the Fenlands of Norfolk
- 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
Characters Discussed
Tom Crick, a history teacher at a private secondary school in Greenwich, England, the spot where time can be said to begin. The narrator, in his mid-fifties, has been an instructor of history for thirty years and is being forced to retire because the authorities contend that history has little value in the modern world. As a means of understanding his part in his wife’s recent mental breakdown and in the deaths of his half brother Dick and boyhood friend Freddie Parr, and in response to his students’ lack of interest in the more orthodox history of the...
[The entire page is 921 words long]
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