This is a sophisticated literary work but also a gripping and twisted story of family, dynasty and trauma. And, with Mary and the toxic old woman—the crude operation leads to septicaemia that almost proves fatal—is Tom Crick, a long way out of his depth. What he forgets, however, is that humans need stories to live well, with others and with nature, and that, when the progressives bulldoze their way through what they think of as the redundant past, what they are really doing is stealing from others a set of narratives, and a way of life, that is, for them, the vivid present, that is: tradition. Waterland is a formidably intelligent book, animated by an impressive, angry pity at what human creatures are capable of doing to one another in the name of love and need. It’s the single most consciously artistic aspect of the novel, and for me, after nearly 40 years, this is what I remember most vividly about it.

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. He also tells Dick that his real father, also their grandfather—his explanation is a tongue-tied attempt to put it all tactfully—was convinced he was going to be the Saviour of the World. Dick’s oversized penis—the young Crick’s worry that she might not have been telling the truth about what he had or had not been able to do with her—and the insistently phallic significance of the eels in these two stories, only seem to make it clear that nothing is clear.

Nothing is quite solid about Tom: his father, a lock-keeper, his brother Dick , “born a freak, a potato-head. Tom had believed this to be possible when he told him, despite Mary’s denials and his own subsequent realisation that it couldn’t be true. What head-teacher Lewis and his ilk would do is to bulldoze those stories into the ground (for our own good, naturally) in the relent¬less and reckless onward pursuit of – what?

The pivot of Waterland focuses on both the past in 1943, and the present time thirty years after – all related through the eyes of Tom as an adolescent. This is the 1980s, with that era’s atmosphere of fear brought on by the seemingly never-ending Arms Race. In a novel about the tragedy of unintended, self-imposed childlessness, it’s extraordinary how central the parent/child relationship proves to be. Famous postmodernist texts include Underworld (1997) by Don DeLillo and Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis (1915). Sitting alongside the scene in Martha Clay’s cottage, there are several little scenes that go to make up the aftermath of the theft of the baby decades later.

Whatever the truth might be, after his daughter and unsuspecting son-in-law move into the cottage next to the New Atkinson Lock, he sends over a box and a key that only young Richard will ever be able to use.

The father and daughter, rattling around in the big house, decide to set it up as a recuperation hospital for war veterans. History, of course, teaches us how to understand, and even some¬times to predict Nature’s rhythms, but Crick’s boss, Lewis, and the one pupil the history teacher dangerously befriends, are both at pains to express their fashionable rejection of history’s wise counsel and complexities. The progress of the project was constantly hampered both by the unexpected natural consequences of the industrial-scale drainage of countless square miles of peatland, and the lack of co-operation on the part of the locals. The only thing I’d remembered about the coming-together of the storylines was how Mary ended up unable to have children. The connotations of that image are unbearable—we’ve been party to a conversation about Mary’s eggs in those magical times by the old windmill.Family and Relationships: The novel delves into the complex relationships between family members, including the dynamics of power, violence, and betrayal. We’ve known about that life-changing choice of Tom and Mary’s since Chapter 6 or 7, and in these later chapters we come to understand some of the consequences.