What Book to Read?

Graham Swift (1949- ) was born in London, son of a civil servant.  He was educated at Dulwich College, London, and did a BA in English at Queens’ College, Cambridge. From 1970-73 he attended York University. He then taught English part-time at several London colleges (1974-83), during which time he published his first two novels, and a book of short stories. The success of his third novel, Waterland (1983), enabled him to give up teaching and write full-time. He is married, and lives in London. As well as the Booker Prize, he has received a number of other British and European literary awards. 

Swift accepts, perhaps somewhat unwillingly, that writers must now play a part in the publicity that surrounds bookselling. In a recent interview, he says ‘When I began writing … my sense of the writer then …was essentially of this person you never saw. They might have a photo on the back of the jacket of the book, but they sat somewhere and they wrote …. All that has changed dramatically. And it’s taken some adjusting.’ But even so, he is not interested in revealing much about himself.  In the same interview, there was the following exchange:

 ‘In the end I produce a novel and it is there for the public. It is there for the reader and it’s not part of the package that they should know how it was for me as I wrote it.

Interviewer: But they want to.

Swift: I know they are interested.

Interviewer: They want to know your shoe size.

Swift: But it’s not necessary. Again, it’s not what it’s really all about.’

What it is really all about for Swift is the power of imagination. There is very little autobiographical content in his work. While all writers no doubt draw in some way on their own experience to produce their fiction, some writers, such as John Fowles, draw heavily on specific experience, whilst others, like Swift, write about ideas that are embodied in imagined characters and situations. 

In most of his books, the setting as such is not a particular focus. This is not however true of Waterland, in which the history and presence of the fen country of the east coast of England are central.  But even here Swift says he had no personal connection with the fens, and did little physical research there, only researching the historical background of the region. ‘I don’t like research’, he says, ‘and my general attitude is to minimize it, do it after, rather than before the writing, or avoid it altogether. If this seems to leave something unexplained, then I would say that the imagination is a strange and powerful thing.’ ‘I have enormous faith in the imagination … if your imagination cannot transport you mentally from where you are to somewhere quite different, then don’t be a novelist, be something else’. 

Nor does he choose to talk much about his books. ‘I cannot usefully say more about my novels than they themselves say.’ But he does talk a little about ‘how it was for me as I wrote it’.  He does not write to any schedule; ‘It takes as long as it takes.’  He does not have a clear picture of how the story will develop. ‘I believe it would be a bad day for a writer if he could say, “I know exactly what I’m doing”… and I hope my imagination will always surprise and stretch me and take me along unsuspected paths, just as I hope it will continue to bring me up against certain things which I will have to recognise as my own peculiar territory – though that too is a process of discovery, not of preconception’. And he stresses the importance of revising his work. ‘Another thing that happens is you don’t get it right the first time. You set out and stop and say, “No, that’s not right. I’ll go back to the beginning.” That uses up time. But it’s good time. That can be tough, but I think that one of the ways I have, dare I say it, matured as a writer is in the process of saying to myself, “No that is not good enough.” And rejecting my own work and in some cases starting again.’

So what do his novels themselves say? A number of preoccupations inform Swift’s work – have become his ‘particular territory’ – though in different ways in each book.  He is interested in the interplay between past and present, and how past events influence present actions.  This includes conflict between generations, and how the choices of one generation influence the next.  There is often some mystery about past events that the present day characters are trying to unravel.  He raises the whole issue of the way we construct a view of the past, and how unreliable that view may be, both in terms of personal histories, and public ones.  Because of the interplay between past and present, his books are often not a linear narrative, but move between then and now, gradually providing a fuller picture of events, motivations and emotions.  He often writes about ordinary people and ordinary events, but in a way that shows the importance of the ordinary, for what can be more important than birth, death, family, love and friendship?  ‘I am the kind of writer’ he says, ‘—it should be pretty obvious—who certainly starts with the ordinary world. The world around the corner, the familiar world. And if there is going to be anything extraordinary, I will find it in that. Of course, there is something extraordinary. There are many extraordinary things’.

Because he plays with the idea of narrative, and questions what is ‘real’, Swift is sometimes considered a post-modernist novelist.  However he says he has little interest in or knowledge of literary theory, and his discussions with other writers tend to be about things other than books. 

His ultimate interest is in getting the story to express what he wants to say. Though the voice or voices in the story are appropriate to the character – university academic, school teacher, car salesman, butcher, detective – he uses simple and direct language.  ‘Another way in which I hope I have progressed as a writer’, he says, ‘is in the direction of economy and concision in the direction of saying quite a lot in a few words and even then saying it with quite simple words’. But even more than this, he wants to give a sense of ‘what lies beyond the word’. People – characters – may not be particularly articulate, but they have inner thoughts and perceptions that are valuable. ‘The words themselves are not the be all and end all of writing. They are only there to give something, to transmit something. And that’s why often the best words are the least noticeable words, because they are transparent. The feeling comes through. So, in that sense my novels have reduced, fewer words, simpler words. But I hope what lies beyond is always expanding, if I can put it like that.’

Swift’s books are:

The Sweet Shop Owner (1980)

Shuttlecock (1981)

Learning to Swim and Other Stories (1982)

Waterland (1983)

Out of this World (1988)

Ever After (1992)

Last Orders (1996)

The Light of Day (2003)

Tomorrow (2007)

 He has also produced The Magic Wheel: An Anthology of Fishing in Literature (co-editor with David Profumo) (1985).  Fishing is his main hobby.

The Sweetshop Owner concerns the memories and opinions of a shopkeeper in his final hours, and while he looks back over forty years of lack of fulfillment, there is ‘hidden poetry’ in his apparently insignificant life.  Shuttlecock is about the search by a former police department archivist for the truth about his father’s life: was he really the World War II hero that he presented himself as?  Both these books were well received, and Swift was named one of the 20 best young British authors in 1983.

But it was Waterland that made him really well known. It is a first-person account of the central events of the life of Tom Crick, a history teacher who has been offered early retirement. He interrupts his final classes to deliver a rambling memoir about his youth in the fens, going back before WWI and interspersing his recollections with historical and philosophical comment about the fens and their inhabitants, past and present. The book was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and in 1992, made into a film staring Jeremy Irons and Sinead Cusack. 

It was followed by Out of this World (1988), the story, told as two interlocking monologues, of a photojournalist and his estranged daughter.  Then came Ever After (1992), in which a university academic reflects on his life, and his failure to complete the task of editing the papers of a nineteenth century ancestor.  Neither of these books was considered to be as good as Waterland, not quite reaching the heights he had previously achieved.

Last Orders (1996) was, however, a worthy successor.  Four aging men drive from London to Margate to fulfill the request of their dead friend, Jack Dodds, that his ashes be scattered in the sea off Margate Pier.  His wife Amy doesn’t come; she has a different journey to make.  With several detours on the way, they spend a day carrying the jar with Jack’s ashes in it to the sea.  During the course of the day, the reader comes to understand the friendships and tensions between each of the men, and something of their relationships with their own families, and with Amy.  The chief spokesman is Ray, but all the others, including Jack and Amy, are given a voice, and these interweaving voices gradually build up a picture of their own lives and interactions with the others.  Some describe events as they happen, some is told as recollection of the past, and some as flashback to past events.  By the end of the day, decisions have been made that may take the characters to a better future.

The prose is simple and colloquial.  The lives of the characters are ordinary and their past experiences unremarkable, (though in some ways they are representative of aspects of post war British society and the economic realities of Thatcher’s England in which the story is set).  But Swift succeeds brilliantly in his aim of revealing the thoughts and feelings behind the inarticulate voices of the characters – the love, the loss, the frustrations, the guilt and betrayals, the hopes and aspirations of ordinary people trying to cope with life and death in lives that yet contain, as Swift says, moments that are extraordinary.  ‘It is an emotionally charged and technically suburb example’, wrote one critic, ‘of the novel’s power to resolve the wavering meanings of life we all share into a definite focus, one where the clarity with which things are seen renders them precious’.  There was general agreement that Swift deserved the Booker Prize he won for this novel.

Swift’s next novel is The Light of Day (2003). Again the action takes place over one day.  George Webb, former policeman and now private detective, goes to the office, meets his daughter, goes to visit a former client, now in goal for the murder of her husband, and goes back to the office.  But in the course of the day, George realises that he has found what he thought he lacked – a reason for living.  So it is again from the ordinary that the extraordinary emerges. 

His most recent novel is Tomorrow (2007). A woman is lying awake, sleepless because tomorrow she has to tell her sixteen year old twins something she worries will completely change their family life. I didn’t find this short book to be one of his great ones.

 His most recent work is a collection of non-fiction pieces called Making an Elephant (2009). This has some autobiographical elements, which is as much as reader is likely to find out about him. Unsurprisingly, he doesn’t have a web site.