47 pages • 1 hour read
Graham SwiftWaterland
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1983A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 31-35Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 31 Summary: “A Teacher’s Testament”
After school, during one of his remaining workdays, a dejected Tom walks on the school playground. He’s slightly drunk and addressing his imaginary children with rhetorical questions, the last one being, “What is a history teacher?” (235), to which he gives various answers. He supplies his “children” with reasons not to drink alcohol, then Price suddenly appears. Price is waiting to meet with others who have formed an “Anti-Armageddon” (236) club under the guise of a chess club. He expresses sympathy about Tom’s wife and says the other students feel the same way.
They go to The Duke’s Head pub, where they drink and discuss the club, which was inspired by something Tom said in class. Price apologizes, saying, “I’m sorry I messed up your classes, sir. I’m sorry I cocked things up for you” (239). Tom replies, “That’s what education’s about” (239).
Tom gets progressively drunk and recounts his conversation with Lewis earlier that day, in which Lewis called him “a tired old cynic who’s been teaching too long” (241). When the barman asks if Price is 18, Tom says he is and claims him as his son.
Chapter 32 Summary: “About Beauty and the Beast”
Still in the pub, Tom relates the curious story of Dick, “not a saviour of the world. A potato-head. Not a hope for the future. A numbskull with the dull, vacant stare of a fish” (242). He tells Price of Dick’s many inadequacies, as well as his tender attributes: his childlike curiosity, rugged physical qualities, and special gifts. Dick also loved Mary and compelled her to educate him in the ways of love, yet his mental capacities were so limited he never really grasped the concept.
Chapter 33 Summary: “Who Says?”
Price interrupts by reverting back to the reason Lewis called Tom a cynical teacher: Tom believes children one day will be like their parents instead of “heirs of the future, vessels of hope” (240). Price is nonplussed Tom would think this way and unconsciously blurts out, “Supposing you could have children now, sir, just supposing…would you?” (259). Startled, Tom flushes, looking “confused, guilty, aghast” (259).
Chapter 34 Summary: “Too Big”
Tom returns to the Mary and Dick anecdote. He specifies that Mary’s child is not Dick’s because, in her words, he is “Too Big.” Tom wants to believe this and does for the most part. Mary later denies her baby is Dick’s, and says it is Freddie’s to protect Tom, so Dick kills Freddie, prompting Mary to devise a plan.
Chapter 35 Summary: “Unknown Country”
Tom continues recounting his present life story, depicting the day he returns home from teaching school to find his wife with a baby. Tom demands to know where the baby came from, only for Mary to proclaim that the baby came “From God. I got it from God” (265). Tom then struggles to take the baby away, and when he finally does so, she slumps onto the couch, defeated. She mentions that God gave them the child one last time, then finally admits she took the baby from Safeways in Lewisham.
Chapters 31-35 Analysis
Forgiveness and acceptance overtake individual differences in Chapter 31, when Tom and Price break down barriers, and their roles symbolically shift from teacher and student to father and son. The past, therefore, quells some of its own demons by embracing hope for a future yet to be realized. Given the unfortunate outcomes of past events, however, this breakdown of roles and the emergence of hope serve as warning against dogged optimism.
In Chapter 32, Swift directly correlates the classic fairy tale “The Beauty and the Beast” to Mary and Dick’s unlikely relationship. Yet he forces the audience to face a reality in which there is no happy ending but the painful consequences of an ill-begotten union instead. Once again trouble appears in the form of a beautiful woman disrupting the balance of nature. In this case, Mary entices rather than placates, putting her own insatiable desires first, causing mayhem, confusion, and fateful consequences as her friends each fall in love with her.
In Chapter 33, Price’s rejection of Tom’s theory on time proves that naïve youth must gain wisdom through experience. The idea that having children will cure society’s ills is also misguided. Swift’s emphasis on realism is never more obvious than here: Tom’s past has proven children are not instant remedies to life’s ills, but young Price must learn this for himself.
Storytelling in the form of lies, or possible lies, creates a confusion that mimics the watery, silty Fens and the thick phlegm inhabiting the Cricks’ bodies. The idea that phlegm must be expelled to release toxins harmful to the body comes to mind here. Both Mary and Henry hold secrets that should have been told; by hiding them, they cause themselves and others undue agony.
Extreme pathos is exhibited in Chapter 35. The fate of a wife’s fragile sanity hangs in the balance, as does that of a vulnerable baby. Tom, the desperate husband, symbolizes the voice of reason. Mary repeatedly says that the baby is a gift from God, though Tom knows that “God doesn’t talk any more” (268). His attempt to wrestle the baby away from Mary symbolizes a fight between logic and the illogical, between the earthly and the ethereal. When Mary slumps onto the couch, broken, she’s effectively lost not only her grip on the baby but her grip on reality. She is no longer Tom’s protector—the brazen girl of his youth. Instead, Mary becomes someone who needs to be protected from herself.
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