He must know that his endless explanations of how and why his life turned out as it did are a kind of extended therapy session.

In their watery Fenland world, they are archetypes of a different kind, phlegmatic and doggedly prepared to carry out whatever needs doing to keep body and soul together. 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. In the imagined words of his bemused pupils, he describes how in the middle of a lesson on the French Revolution ‘he breaks off and starts telling—these stories.At night, he sits on the railway line with a bottle of whiskey, waiting for the next train to roll right over him. When the old woman is about to perform her operation, having told Mary to put her hand over the candle flame if things get too unbearable, she tells Tom to go outside and make himself useful. 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.

How many of the events of history have occurred, ask yourselves, for this or for that reason, but for no other reason, fundamentally, than the desire to make things happen? Sometimes the way he adds details to stories we already know—those layers I talked about—seems almost obsessive. And so on, for another long chapter, About the Ouse, until we are back where we were fifteen pages ago, at Longitude 0 ˚. He’s sitting in the sunny space between the chicken coop and the kitchen door, where Mother stands, in her apron.Among other things, the adult Crick likes to go into detailed explanations of how universal and futile nostalgia is, and that dreadful phrase, ‘If only’. And we remember how, right from the beginning of the novel, he has insisted on how a moment in the ‘here and now’ can echo down the years. In his own confused state, he is desperate to make Dick understand that he must never have children of his own. And that, after Tom appeared to have won an underwater swimming contest, Dick dived in and swam underwater for so long that they had all thought he’d drowned?