ABSTRACT
This chapter charts Swift's engagement with that problem throughout his work, and does so in relation to his constant themes of love, loss, nostalgia and grief. Broadly speaking, modernity can be understood as the attempt, since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to understand the world, philosophically and scientifically without recourse to religious or mystical accounts. The story of Waterland concerns the local causes and effects of the murder and then drowning, in the summer of 1943, of the adolescent Tom Crick's friend Freddie Parr. Graham Swift's work offers an exemplary case of the artist who attempts to come to terms with, and to represent, both the possibility and the difficulty of really mourning modernity's losses. The Revolution itself stands as a synecdoche of Enlightenment modernity, and of a false notion of progress. An archaeology and genealogy of land and family builds up as the novel progresses.
