Graham Swift

British novelist and short-story writer.

• Born: May 4, 1949
• Place of Birth: London, England

Biography

Graham Colin Swift is one of England’s important novelists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Born in London in 1949, he did not directly experience the momentous events of the Depression-ridden 1930s, World War II, or the difficult postwar problems of social and economic recovery, but his work has consistently concerned itself with history and its subtle influences. Swift, whose father was a government civil servant, attended Dulwich College in London, where two other noted writers, Raymond Chandler and P. G. Wodehouse, preceded him half a century before. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree from the University of Cambridge in 1970 and received his master’s from the same university in 1975. He also attended the University of York. He was a part-time English instructor in London from the mid-1970s until the success of his third novel, Waterland, published in 1983. Swift's first novel, The Sweet Shop Owner, was published in 1980, and his subsequent work achieved praise and awards. Waterland (1983) was a finalist for the prestigious Booker Prize and was named by The Guardian as the best English novel of 1983.

The Sweet Shop Owner contains many themes that have continued to occupy Swift. Willy Chapman, the protagonist, is the long-standing proprietor of a small London shop. His wife, now dead, married Willy to spite and escape her family, and provided the funds and the initial discipline that made the shop successful. The novel takes place on the last day of Chapman’s life. Swift illuminates Chapman’s story with a series of flashbacks to his own history and the relations with his wife and estranged daughter, all governed by the long-established currents and rhythms of his ordered existence. On his last day, Willy—suffering from heart disease—rebels against those rhythms in the futile hope and expectation that his daughter will return. Personal history rather than the usual history of war and politics infuses the story; family relationships, or the lack of them, provide the story’s focus; and alienation, personal and familial, and its unrequited quest for healing, is the overriding theme.

These concerns continue to dominate Swift’s work. His second novel, Shuttlecock (1981), is also a history of personal and familial alienation. Prentis, like Chapman, is a cog in society’s machine, working as an archivist or researcher in the police bureaucracy. As Willy was dominated by his wife, so Prentis is subjected to his superior. Prentis’s relations with his wife and son are also strained and convoluted. Again, history and its permeability play a part in the story of Prentis’s father, ostensibly a war hero who, in reality, was perhaps the opposite. However, there is no resolution to the problems raised in the novel, and the questions asked remain unanswered. In 1982, Swift published a series of short stories in Learning to Swim, and Other Stories. Swift wrote the stories before any of his novels, and they announce, in miniature, many of his characteristic themes. For example, "Learning to Swim" relates the tale of an unsatisfactory marriage, and in "The Watch" Swift tells a magical story of time and history. He later published another collection of short stories entitled England and Other Stories (2014).

Waterland was the novel that captured the attention of the critics. Swift’s tale of Tom Crick, a history teacher, and Crick’s story of his present life and past history—including the saga of his own ancestors—has been compared to the works of Charles Dickens, William Faulkner, and James Joyce. As often happens in Swift’s writings, Crick’s relationship with his childhood, his students, his wife, and the headmaster of the school where he teaches is difficult, consuming, and fated. Crick, in his fifties, is being made redundant: History is being cut back and merged with something called general studies. Yet the headmaster and the educational establishment are not being merely philistine; Crick himself has abandoned formal history—the history of the French Revolution—to relate the more intimate, personal history of himself, his ancestors, and the Fens, the waterlands of the title, of Eastern England. In addition, Crick’s wife, unable to have a child of her own, had kidnapped an infant, was apprehended, and is in a mental institution. The Fens—flat but always changing from land to water and back again—become a metaphor for the convolutions between past and present, between sons and fathers, husbands and wives, reality and imagination, history and fiction. Crick and his worlds reflect the themes that Swift had earlier explored: the impact of an earlier time, the aloneness and alienation of the individual, and the difficulty, if not impossibility, of relating to others.

Swift followed Waterland with Out of This World, published in 1988. Here, the author again works with generational relationships, this time between a sixty-ish photographer, Harry Beech, who is photographing from the air the prehistoric remains of England, and his daughter Sophie, undergoing psychoanalysis in New York. Experiences, the past, and history have all come between them, and Swift explores the attempt to restitch the rift to transcend what has occurred before. The chapters generally alternate between the first-person narratives of Harry and Sophie, with other voices remaining muted in the background. In its stylistic austerity, Out of This World is reminiscent of Swift’s early work. Still, it carries forward his concerns with communication between generations, the interplay of public and personal histories, and the nature and functions of narrative.

In 1992, Swift published a fifth novel, Ever After. Beginning like Waterland’s Tom Crick with the impetus of a personal crisis—here the deaths of his wife, mother, and stepfather and his own attempted suicide—university lecturer Bill Unwin searches the past for a foundation on which to rebuild his life. He hopes to justify his tenuous academic standing by editing the notebooks of his ancestor, Matthew Pearce, an associate of the famous nineteenth-century engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Instead, he finds himself exploring the elusiveness of knowledge and the arbitrary nature of what we call "history." Like Waterland, Ever After offers a multilayered, evocative narrative that raises complex questions about the relations between art and life. Its uncharacteristically positive conclusion suggests that the very impulse to write—either fiction or history—is a foredoomed but eternally hopeful manifestation of the desire to defy mortality.

Like The Sweet Shop Owner, Last Orders, and The Light of Day, each takes place on a single day. Last Orders, which won the 1996 Booker Prize, recounts the journey made by a group of men, friends since World War II, to scatter the ashes of one of them who has died. The trip allows the friends to assess who they are and where their lives have led them. In The Light of Day, private investigator George Webb’s interior monologue meditates on his childhood, his scandal-terminated police career, his failed marriage, and the case that led to the day’s investigations, which ended with his client murdering her unfaithful husband.

Swift's next novel was Tomorrow (2007), another story of family history and complexity, told as a mother's inner monologue. However, it received mixed negative reviews, with many commentators comparing it unfavorably with the similarly structured The Light of Day. It was followed by Swift's first nonfiction work, Making and Elephant: Writing from Within. 2011 saw the release of the novel Wish You Were Here, set in contemporary times in rural England. Once again, themes of family and history were central, with other issues such as the war in Iraq and the decline of farming all playing into the suspenseful work. Another novel, Mothering Sunday, was published in 2016, with a narrative about the life and romance of an English country maid spanning the twentieth century. In 2020, he published the novel Here We Are, following the life of a magician.

Regarding his constant references to history and its echoes and their relationship to his novels and short stories, Swift has written, "Fiction is not fact, but it is not fraud. The imagination has the power of sheer, fictive invention, but it also carries us to truth, to make us arrive at knowledge we did not possess and even looked at from a common point of view, though we had no right to possess."

Later in his career, Swift published several short stories in The New Yorker, including "Blushes" (2021), "Fireworks" (2022), "Hinges" (2022), and "Bruises" (2023).

Author Works

Long Fiction:

The Sweet Shop Owner, 1980

Shuttlecock, 1981

Waterland, 1983

Out of This World, 1988

Ever After, 1992

Last Orders, 1996

The Light of Day, 2003

Tomorrow, 2007

Wish You Were Here, 2011

Mothering Sunday: A Romance, 2016

Here We Are, 2020

Short Fiction:

Learning to Swim, and Other Stories, 1982

Chemistry, 2008

England and Other Stories, 2014

Blushes, 2021

Fireworks, 2022

Hinges, 2022

Bruises, 2023

Nonfiction:

Making an Elephant: Writing from Within, 2009

Bibliography

Broich, Ulrich. "Muted Postmodernism: The Contemporary British Short Story." Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, vol. 41, 1993, pp. 31-39.

Cooper, Pamela. Graham Swift’s "Last Orders." Continuum, 2002.

Decoste, Damon Marcel. "Question and Apocalypse: The Endlessness of Historia in Graham Swift’s Waterland." Contemporary Literature, vol. 43, Summer 2002, pp. 377-99.

Frumkes, Lewis Burke. "A Conversation with Graham Swift." The Writer, vol. 111, Feb. 1998, pp. 19-21.

"Graham Swift." British Council: Literature, British Council, literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/graham-swift. Accessed 20 July 2024.

Higdon, David Leon. "’Unconfessed Confessions’: The Narrators of Graham Swift and Julian Barnes." In The British and Irish Novel Since 1960, edited by James Acheson. St. Martin’s Press, 1991, pp. 174-91.

Pedot, Richard. "Dead Lines in Graham Swift’s Last Orders." Critique, vol. 44, Fall 2002, pp. 60-71.

Powell, Katrina M. "Mary Metcalf’s Attempt at Reclamation: Maternal Representation in Graham Swift’s Waterland." Women’s Studies, vol. 32, Jan./Feb. 2003, pp. 59-77.

Swift, Graham. "An Interview with Graham Swift." Interview by Catherine Bernard. Contemporary Literature, vol. 38, Summer 1997, pp. 217-31.

Swift, Graham. "Hinges." The New Yorker, 14 Nov. 2022, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/11/21/hinges. Accessed 20 July 2024.

Swift, Graham. Interview by Amanda Smith. Publishers Weekly, vol. 239, 17 Feb. 1992, pp. 43-44.

Widdowson, Peter. "Newstories: Fiction, History, and the Modern World." Critical Survey, vol. 7, 1995, pp. 3-17.