Graham Swift Long Fiction Analysis
Graham Swift is one of a number of British writers who emerged in the early 1980’s to revitalize the English novel by experimenting with new thematic concerns without sacrificing the genre’s roots in realism. Among these are Peter Ackroyd, Julian Barnes, A. S. Byatt, and Penelope Lively. Swift’s work shares with theirs a concern for the relationship between fiction and history, between memory and the reconstruction of the past. His novels almost exclusively employ one or more first-person perspectives, and the reader is left to contemplate the “gap” between what one might consider objective reality and how that reality is constructed or refracted by the respective narrators. These narrators are not so much unreliable as they are both the creators and the products of their own pasts. Swift’s novels as a whole are marked by the absence of communication, and it is never clear to the reader to whom the narrators’ words are directed. In this sense, they often read as internal and reluctant confessions, marked in many instances by the desire for personal exculpation.
The Sweet Shop Owner
Swift’s early work draws on a number of modernist techniques, such as stream of consciousness, shifting perspectives, and a concern for the experience and passing of time. This is particularly true of Swift’s first novel, The Sweet Shop Owner, which offers a single June day in the life of Willy Chapman. The allusion to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925), and more distantly to James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), is no accident. The Sweet Shop Owner opens with Chapman contemplating a letter from his daughter severing ties between them. Subsequently, it develops in two directions: following Willy through this, the last day of his life, and tracing the events of the previous forty years leading up to this point. As in subsequent novels, Swift is concerned here with the breakup of family structure and the barrenness of modern life, isolation punctuated occasionally by poignant connections and missed connections.
Shuttlecock
These themes are taken up in Shuttlecock, in a rather more pointed way, particularly in terms of epistemology (the way in which we understand or make sense of the world). The narrator, Prentis, works in an obscure government archive office under the watchful eye of his boss, who often requests files and reports that are missing or incomplete. The paranoia this creates in the narrator reaches a climax when these requests seem to bear on the past of Prentis’s own father, known to all as a war hero. Ultimately Prentis is, like the reader, faced with two profound and contemporary questions in terms of the problems of knowledge and textuality: Is his father’s heroic memoir fictional or true? Given the opportunity to discover the truth, should he do so or not?
The Light of Day and Tomorrow
The questions raised in Swift’s second novel are reminiscent of those posed by detective fiction, which is preeminently concerned, of course, with epistemological certainty, with solving mysteries, with determining the truth. Similar elements are found in Swift’s later novel The Light of Day, in which the narrator is a detective. In typically Swiftian fashion, however, the structural components of the detective-story genre are thoroughly subverted, to the extent that solving the apparent crime is one of the least significant of the novel’s concerns; rather, the narrator of The Light of Day fuses past and present to create an extended meditation on the nature of love and human relationships. Tomorrow also generates suspense toward some unstated (until the end) climactic event; the narrator reflects late one night on a family secret that will, when revealed...
(This entire section contains 1791 words.)
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to the children in the morning, profoundly affect their lives and the family as a whole. Notably, Swift employs a female narrator-interior monologuist for the first time inTomorrow and, again, his ability to create a genuine and credible narrative voice is evident.
Out of This World and Ever After
If in Shuttlecock the narrator is confronted with a profound dilemma—to know or not to know the truth—Swift’s ensuing novels explore the characteristic postmodernist epistemological concern of whether such knowledge is even possible. In Out of This World and Ever After this issue is taken up through examination of the relationship between reality and its representation—in the former case through photographic representation (the primary narrator is a photojournalist) and in the latter through the textual representation of a nineteenth century geologist’s memoirs (the narrator is a novelist-historian working on a biography of the memoirs’ author). Simply put, in a world in which representations proliferate, the distinction between the fake and the real, the false and the true, history and fiction, becomes increasingly difficult to define. Swift’s novels as a whole record the often devastating consequences of this dissolution.
Waterland
With his third novel, Swift achieved “breakout” success. Waterland, arguably Swift’s most sophisticated novel, has achieved numerous accolades. Significantly, the bulk of scholarly work on Swift’s fiction has focused on Waterland, and the novel has been selected in Britain as a “set text” on national high school examinations in English literature.
Told from the perspective of a history teacher, Tom Crick, the novel thoroughly explores questions of contemporary historiography and knowledge. Faced with a number of pressures, Tom switches from the official focus of his class—the French Revolution—to stories of his own childhood in the half-real, half-magical Fenlands of East Anglia, in Britain. In doing so, and seeking to provide an explanation for certain profound events in his past—the murder of a schoolmate and a primitive abortion endured by his future wife—he finds he is forced to provide contexts that ripple out in ever-widening circles. To understand what happened, Cricks suggests, one must understand the families involved and the folklore of the Fens. To understand those, one needs to understand the ancestry of the families and the history of the region. Including, among many other things, a geological and geographical explanation of how this reclaimed land came into being, a history of brewing in the area, and a (historically accurate) biological history of the eel, Waterland’s scope is immense and allusive.
The many digressions, prevarications, contradictions, and narrative shifts in Tom’s account may be seen as an ironic reflection on the historian’s positivist ideal of exhaustiveness, on the desire to know and fix the truth. This apparently Sisyphean quest explains the generic juxtapositions of Tom’s narrative, drawing on the rhetorical approaches not only of biology and social history but also of folklore and detective fiction, for example. Even the language itself is unstable: References to the eel—snake, fish, phallic symbol, source of food, consumer of the aborted fetus, and source of the name of the Fenland town of Ely—offer only one example of the slipperiness of language; thus the desire for a pure and transparent language to represent reality on the part of historians and scientists is undermined throughout the novel.
Such is the power and vivid detail of Waterland that many readers have assumed that Swift must have grown up in or at least have intimate personal knowledge of the Fens in order to re-create so powerfully the world of the Fenlanders and their culture. In fact, apart from his time in the city of Cambridge, virtually all that he presents in Waterland derives from what he learned through extensive reading on the subject.
Last Orders
Swift’s sixth novel is often considered his best, although many would argue that Waterland holds that position. On the surface Last Orders unfolds a deceptively simple plot: Three aging south Londoners, accompanied by their deceased friend’s estranged son, travel to Margate to carry out the friend’s last wish that his ashes be cast into the sea off the Kentish coast. Where Swift’s previous narrators (a history teacher, a photojournalist, a university fellow) reflect quite articulately on the problems of representation and knowledge raised in their narratives, Last Orders presents the reader with the working-class neighborhood of Bermondsey in London, the world of a grocer, an insurance clerk, a used-car salesman, and a butcher. Structurally, however, the novel is as complex as anything Swift has written. Last Orders comprises seventy-five sections and employs seven narrators; seventeen of the sections move the plot forward in the narrative present as the men drive toward Margate, while the remainder constitute interior monologues in which characters recall moments when their lives intersected, creating a sort of amorphous collective memory stretching back to World War II. The narrative structure creates a spatial and temporal movement: Its labyrinthine quality mirrors the many detours on the way to Margate and also the elaborate network of intersections wherein past meets present.
Whereas elsewhere in Swift’s work the isolation of individuals is emphasized by their interior monologues, in Last Orders the effect is, in part, to create a sense of the social world inhabited by these working-class characters and of the slender but strong threads that tie them together. True, this world is marked by a complex pattern of absences and substitutions, but it is maintained nonetheless. Another central theme of the novel is chance or coincidence, which reflects ironically on the cause-and-effect pattern established by definition in all narrative forms. This is apparent in Ray Johnson’s success at betting on horses. While Ray himself claims this is simply the result of careful analysis, the names of the horses reflect what their victories represent: Ray’s tip “Shady Lady” pays off for Vince, a used-car salesman whose daughter becomes a prostitute; when Ray makes love with his friend’s wife, “Conquistador” is the victor; and the long-shot outsider whose victory provides Ray’s friend’s informal life insurance on the day of the friend’s death is, most appropriately, “Miracle Worker.”
The awarding of the Booker Prize to Last Orders was not without controversy, primarily generated by the popular press. Months after the announcement, an Australian professor pointed out what to those familiar with William Faulkner’s work is quite obvious: that Swift’s novel draws on the themes and techniques of Faulkner’s Deep South gothic As I Lay Dying (1930). Amid accusations of plagiarism in the press, Swift received support from previous Booker winners, including Kazuo Ishiguro and Salman Rushdie. In fact, Swift had a year earlier brought attention to his having drawn on Faulkner in a magazine interview, but the news media—and one member of the five-member Booker committee—were not interested in the nuances of allusiveness or other common literary techniques. The furor died down very quickly, however, as is almost always the case with the British popular press, and Last Orders remains probably Swift’s most widely read novel.