Waterland

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He never denies the truth in what they assert—I lost count of how many times he comments on the fairy-tale qualities of what he describes—but, nonetheless, he wants to prove beyond any doubt that it’s the past that defines us.

But there are a lot of things I haven’t mentioned, including the way the chapters are becoming shorter and more fragmented-seeming. This ‘low-lying region of eastern England’ with the ‘shallow shifting waters’ that half-covered it before a Dutchman came to drain it is known to most people born in the country, even hundreds of miles away. Potato-headed Dick was fine, humming to his motorbike and doing the kind of work suited to somebody like him. In the wake of Mary stealing a child, Crick begins to come to terms with the fact that his wife may be schizophrenic.

Crick knows perfectly well that nobody’s life is predetermined, but he’s setting out his interconnected stories to make it seem as though it is.

And that, after Tom appeared to have won an underwater swimming contest, Dick dived in and swam underwater for so long that they had all thought he’d drowned? Regardless of the connections beween Swift's masterpiece and great American novels, this is a fantastic book completely soaked in the atmosphere of its surroundings and doing for the fens what Hardy did for Wessex and Du Maurier for Cornwall.Crick describes his first discovery of female anatomy, from the coppery hairs that have appeared recently down to the folds inside that have the extraordinary capacity to cling first to one finger, then another. Waterland is about Tom Crick, a history teacher who is losing his job because history is no longer seen as important by his school's headmaster.