C hange and Continuity: The novel explores the tension between change and continuity, particularly in relation to the shifting landscape of the Fens. While the draining of the Fens represented a profound change in the region, the novel suggests that the underlying rhythms and cycles of life continue, albeit in different forms. Children, beware the paternal instinct whenever it appears in your officially approved and professionally trained mentors. In what direction is it working, whose welfare is it serving? This desire to protect and provide, this desire to point the way; this desire to hold sway amongst children.’ Tai viena tų istorijų, kurioje man nėra labai svarbu iki kur nuves, kaip baigsis. Joje svarbu būti, išgyventi, jausti. Ir nors tikrai buvo smalsu, kaip ta baigta dėlionė atrodys, procesas džiugino daug labiau! Mėgavausi, kai buvau viliojama ir už rankos vedama, pastūmiama prireikus, ar tiesiogiai pabaksnojama faktais prieš akis.💛 Graham Colin Swift FRSL (born 4 May 1949) is an English writer. Born in London, England, he was educated at Dulwich College, London, Queens' College, Cambridge, and later the University of York.

Read the full text of John Burnside’s lecture ‘“Soliloquies of suffering and consolation”: Fiction as elegy and refusal’, published in the Journal of British Academy in December 2017. Loss is very prevalent in Waterland. Many of the central characters lose very significant things throughout Swift's novel. The impact of loss is also shown. In his 2017 lecture to the British Academy, John Burnside discussed an important strand of British fiction over the last thirty years – exemplified by work by Graham Swift, Adam Thorpe and Michael Bracewell – in which the growth of ‘cultural totalitarianism’ has engendered a profound grief for the consequent loss of communal and ritual life, as well as for the land itself which has been ‘savagely degraded’ over the same period. In this extract, he talks about the 1983 novel Waterland by Graham Swift. And so the protagonist of the book, Tom, a history teacher in a high school, tells us a story. About the “waterland”, the low-lying fens somewhere in east England. About drainage and beer brewing, madness and murder, coming of age, incest, abortion and childlessness.

Preferences

What is drawn is no happy story, but it feels real. We read of the discovery and awakening of sexual desire. Of incest, mental retardation, jealousy and envy. Abortion and deaths. A father fights in the First World War and his son in the Second World War. I enjoyed the slow, circular process of reading Waterland. I especially savored the parallel structure and imagery embedded in the prose. The novel's protagonist and storyteller is a history teacher. Swift's method of using the teacher's lessons to tell the stories in the book gives the novel a sense of breaking down the fourth wall.

It's a totally bizarre story, I went with its bizarreness," says Swift. "I suppose of all the stories in the book it is the most weirdly many-faceted. It brings together so many diverse things in, of all places, Exmoor." Atmosferiškas, gilus, persmelktas pelkių, vandens ir cikliškumo pasakojimas. Emociškai sunkus kaip švinas, bet teikiantis begalinį pasimėgavimą! Kaip aš jums noriu papasakoti apie šią knygą, ir kartu kaip jaudinuosi, kad neužteks žodžių, kad nežinau nuo ko pradėti. O jausmų tiek daug ir gilių kilo, ir nesu tikra, ar visus juos įžodint galiu. All these stories are bits of England but they are bits of different Englands," he says. "England now is such a heterogenous, indefinable place. I like the title England and Other Stories because what a lot of people think of as England may be just a story now. I myself am obviously unequivocally and indigenously English, I was born in England and I'm very attached to my country. But I think as a writer all the time I'm approaching it as though it might be a strange place."

Swift is a private person and does not have an extensive public persona. He currently lives in London with his partner Candice Rodd. He is still actively writing. Graham Swift Books There’s this thing called progress. But it doesn’t progress, it doesn’t go anywhere. Because as progress progresses the world can slip away. It’s progress if you can stop the world slipping away. My humble model for progress is the reclamation of land. Which is repeatedly, never-endingly retrieving what is lost. A dogged, vigilant busi-ness. A dull yet valuable business. A hard, inglorious business. But you shouldn’t go mistaking the reclamation of land for the building of empires.’ Metafiction refers to when a text makes the reader aware that they are reading a fictional text. It is self-referential. The story might examine the very means of storytelling itself. Children, only animals live entirely in the Here and Now. Only nature knows neither memory nor history. But man - let me offer you a definition - is the storytelling animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting marker-buoys and trail-signs of stories. He has to go on telling stories. He has to keep on making them up. As long as there's a story, it's all right. Even in his last moments, it's said, in the split second of a fatal fall - or when he's about to drown - he sees, passing rapidly before him, the story of his whole life.” Murder, incest, guilt, insanity, ale and eels. Hard to imagine not loving a book with themes like that eh? Or is it?