| Graham Swift's first three novels--The Sweet-Shop Owner, Shuttlecock, and Waterland--when taken collectively, make a case for the continuity of human experience, a continuity that emerges once the intellect begins to grapple with explanations for complicated events and to discern a pattern of experience that is universal and timeless. The importance of this notion of continuity, as I intend to use the term, lies in its particular application to modern man, whose fears and neuroses concerning disaster are set against a social backdrop of accelerated change, the result of which has been to blind him to the historical ties that link him with the past. The lesson of history, both natural and artificial, as well learn in Waterland, is not pessimism or submission to despair, but curiosity; it is the same impulse that caries the reader through a good story: the need to know what happens next. When the rebellious student, Price, challenges his history teacher, Tom Crick, with the remark that "the only important thing about history... is that it's got to the point where it's probably about to end."; Bertrand Russell, among others in this century, has asked the question: "Has man a future?" Swift's examination of contemporary mores suggests that man may well be in the process of willing that future away, in a self-fulfilling prophecy of nuclear war. In Waterland, Swift finds an answer in history. With Faulkner, he would agree that we "endure" in spite of ourselves, but he would add that we also persevere. In the Fenman's Sisyphean bouts with land reclamation, he had found a timeless and universal metaphor for the human condition. The challenge of building new modes of relationships and reconnecting with one another in a meaningful way is one that mankind is equipped to meet. This is the lesson of history, and this is the lesson of Waterland. |
