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. It’s become clear, as the half-way point of the novel has been passed, that his pronouncements are really all about himself. Parents and children, and what we seek when they aren’t there, or never existed in the first place…. These little echoes over time are like internal rhymes, binding the different threads together in ways we can’t quite define….

We learn almost nothing of their lives, either individually or together—Mary is almost a cipher now, hardly a rounded character at all—beyond the routines of their conventional-sounding theatre trips and holidays, and their Sunday afternoon walks to Greenwich Park. If we did, we’d forgotten—Crick is so keen to contrast the phlegmatic Cricks, his ancestors, with the enterprising Atkinsons—and we realise he’s performed another bit of sleight of hand on us. But I can’t remember whether he actually reminds her that he wasn’t the one who made the false claim about Freddie being the father.Tom is appalled and confused, and one of the first things he does is put right his lie about who had been the father of Mary’s child.

This edition includes an introduction, by the author, written to celebrate the book’s 25th anniversary. The draining of the Fens in the 17th and 18th centuries is presented as a traumatic event that disrupted the social and economic structures of the region and forced its inhabitants to adapt to new ways of life.His two short story collections are Learning to Swim and Other Stories (1982) and England and Other Stories (2014). Now come the details of how his father clumsily hauls the body from the water, so that new injuries begin to hide what is visible at first, a big bruise on the face. These happen when she is a young woman but impact the rest of her life and the lives of those around her. Family and Relationships: The novel delves into the complex relationships between family members, including the dynamics of power, violence, and betrayal.

There’s even a historical fairy-tale touch with the alleged sighting of the long dead, brain-damaged wife of an earlier Atkinson reciting the ‘something is burning’ line that was the only thing she ever used to say after the life-changing injury inflicted by her husband.He doesn’t tell us that this is going to be a narrative about the implacability of regret because he seems to have made a decision to prove—to the reader, to his students and, most impossibly, to himself—that his life, like everything else that has ever happened, is a matter of historical inevitability. When you labour to subdue it, you have to understand that one day it may rise up and turn all your labours to nothing.