Where better to Start discussing this big, complex, clever novel than with its title, thence proceeding to its two epigraphs? The word ‘Waterland’ is, of course, Graham Swift's coinage, which, by running the two elements together as one word, suggests the indissoluble intermingling of earth and water, the forming of a kind of compound (where the whole has properties of its own that are not necessarily those of its constituent parts) or hybrid (which again is qualitatively different from the two or more species from which it is derived). The novel makes a great deal of the endless process of claiming and then reclaiming land from the waters in the Fens of eastern England; the building of dykes, canals and drainage systems; the constant endangering of such systems by the water's equally relentless attempts to reclaim the land for itself; and the murkiness, therefore, of the liquid land or earthy water that dominates the habitat of the Fens: ‘His eyes encounter a brown and silent fog. Suspended silt. Stirred-up silt. A domain where earth and water mingle’ (W. 188). But once having read the novel, we may see that the title-word flags other forms of interpenetration (compounds, hybrids) with which Waterland centrally concerns itself: past and present, history and story, fact and fiction, the impossibility of separating them out one from the other, and the impenetrability of the swirling, murky discourses that compose and relate them.

Hence, the point of the novel's second epigraph - ‘Ours was the marsh country …’ (a quotation from Dickens's Great Expectations) - where ‘marsh countr’ is, of course, exactly ‘waterland’, but which takes on a further resonance by following the first epigraph: a dictionary definition of the original Greek, and then Latin, word Historia: ‘1. inquiry, investigation, learning. 2. a) a narrative of past events, history. b) any kind of narrative: account, taie, story’. The same word for both ‘history’ and ‘story’? - unstabie and treacherous terrain, indeed. But both the words ‘history’ and ‘story’ do, in fact, derive from the word historia - ‘iearning by inquiry’ (it is worth noticing in passing, therefore, that in its origins ‘story’ means a form of knowledge, a way of knowing).