Graham Swift Overview

Graham Swift seems to have little in common with his literary contemporaries. While most writers these days spatter their novels with pop culture references and play with distortions of time and narrative, Swift sets his books in a nineteenth-century context and... [more]

Graham Swift seems to have little in common with his literary contemporaries. While most writers these days spatter their novels with pop culture references and play with distortions of time and narrative, Swift sets his books in a nineteenth-century context and tells good old-fashioned stories. He is wholly committed to perfecting the art of the novel, developing character with a scrutiny that matches Dickens' and dealing with eternal themes like class struggle and death. Strangely for our times, there's no autobiographical motivation behind this approach. To the dismay of creative writing instructors, Swift rarely writes about what he knows. His novels often deal with death, but his own life has been relatively free of it. Nor was his childhood, like those of many of his characters, grim or troublesome. Yet Swift pulls it off. One would never guess that he's a fill-in-the-blanks author after reading "Ever After," in which a Victorian surveyor (and ancestor of the Swift's modern protagonist) encounters a fossilized ichthyosaurus. The novel's knowledge of Darwin, the Victorian period, and paleontology is so clean and well spoken that the reader is left quite convinced. With or without autobiographical motivation, Swift does exhibit an enduring fascination with death. His first novel, "The Sweet Shop Owner," ends as a dying widower solemnly waits for the return of his estranged daughter. Similarly, "Ever After" concludes with another widower remembering the night he told his wife about his father's suicide. And in "Last Orders" a dying man sends his four old buddies on a journey from south London to the sea at Margate; along the way, they indulge in drink and reminisce about their failed families, the war, and their friendships. But Swift insists that his novels are not gloomy or depressing; he simply explores death rituals, the span of emotions experienced at death, and the liberation that ultimately comes with death. Many revere Swift as a prodigy; he began writing when he was very young and has reinstated a solid, traditional approach to fiction, an approach which today brings with it an air both mysterious and refreshing. Swift's attitude is blunt and to the point. He believes in the novel and in the imagination as the ultimate vehicle for telling stories. [show less]