Shuttlecock by Graham Swift

First published: 1981

Type of work: Mystery

Time of work: c. 1981

Locale: London

Principal Characters:

• Prentis, the narrator, a senior clerk at a criminal information bureau in London
• Quinn, the chief of the bureau
• Marian, Prentis’ wife
• Martin, Prentis’ ten-year-old son
• Peter, Martin’s younger brother
• Prentis, Sr. (“Dad”), a former World War II espionage agent and executive who is placed in a mental institution after a nervous breakdown

The Novel

Shuttlecock is the odd, tense narrative of a man known only as Prentis, a senior clerk in an obscure government agency which collects and preserves information pertaining to closed cases and unsolved crimes. Prentis, the son of a British war hero, lives in the shadow of a past commemorated in his father’s memoirs about the war, Shuttlecock: The Story of a Secret Agent. Over his family’s objections, Prentis goes every Sunday to visit his father in the mental institution where Prentis, Sr., resides as a catatonic after a mysterious breakdown. Since his life at home is unsatisfying and filled with conflict (his sons dislike him as a result of his abusiveness; his wife is a willing but passive “victim” of his frequent sexual advances and is uncommunicative in other matters), Prentis, who is in line to take over Quinn’s position upon the chief’s retirement, becomes obsessed with his job and the business of keeping secrets. His narration of a series of events involving his father’s past and his own complicity in the family history stands in the form of a confession as Prentis exorcises his guilt for terrorizing his sons and turning his wife “into a whore.” In this psychoanalytic parable disguised as a mystery story (much as one of Western culture’s first mysteries, Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, c. 429 B.C., is disguised), the narrator-protagonist of Shuttlecock gains entrance into a form of adulthood by recognizing and, paradoxically, repressing the sins of the father.

The mystery is initiated when Prentis notices that Quinn is holding back some vital information concerning three vaguely related “cases,” of “X,” “Y,” and “Z”:

  X (now deceased), a former civil servant, sacked for alcoholic incompetence and later arrested for a number of petty frauds and sexual offences, who had made allegations against a certain Home Office official, Y—allegations subsequently investigated (without Y’s knowledge, either of the allegations or the investigation) and found to be false. X died of a heart attack while undergoing trial . . . and . . . another Home Official, Z, apparently unconnected, professionally or personally, with Y (or X), who had committed suicide (by stepping in front of an Underground train) shortly after the secret investigations on Y.

As Prentis is accustomed to Quinn’s enigmatic ways, he does not, at first, pursue the missing pieces of the puzzle of X, Y, and Z, and he hands over to the chief the fragmentary information he has retrieved during his investigations. Quinn, however, quite intentionally, has planted the seeds of curiosity and suspicion in Prentis’ mind. On his own, Prentis pursues the investigation while obsessively rereading his father’s memoirs, sensing, unconsciously at first but with ever-increasing awareness, that there is some connection between his father’s internment in a German prisoner-of-war camp and the fates of the three government bureaucrats. Prentis becomes an armchair detective as he attempts to ferret out of the more figurative passages of the memoirs clues concerning a “plot” which seems to involve his father and X, Y, and Z; meanwhile, Prentis becomes more alienated from his family, to the extent that his son, Martin, begins “spying” on him by following Prentis home from work at a distance, never talking to his father and never admitting that he has tracked him.

Thus, Prentis’ pursuit of the truth of his father’s past is doubled by his son’s pursuit of his father: The distance in the first case is temporal, as Prentis (the son) must reestablish his relation to his father through the interpretation of a text; the distance in the second instance is spatial and personal, as Prentis (the father) must reestablish his relation to his son precisely through the psychological rediscovery of his own father.

Eventually, Prentis discovers that his father was being blackmailed by X (who was also blackmailing Y and Z) yet this discovery comes about in a peculiar way. The role of the classic detective is to unearth hidden facts or clues which establish the connections between scattered events, a process that results in the solution of the crime. For Prentis, however, the solution comes through an act of reading “in between the lines” of his father’s account of the heroic trials he undergoes at the prisoner-of-war camp and his fortuitous escape from it. Prentis detects in his father’s prose (actually, through a comparison of the many literal, straightforward passages of the account and those rarer examples of figurative, descriptive language) the “buried” truth: that his father never escaped from the camp but was released by the Germans after succumbing to torture and betraying his comrades; that X was in the camp at the same time as his father and, thus, was able to blackmail him concerning the “escape”; and that, years later, Prentis, Sr., had an affair with the wife of his close friend Z, who “collapsed” upon discovery of the double betrayal. Prentis’ suspicions are strengthened in a long conversation with Quinn, who has “set up” Prentis to make these discoveries and who offers to show Prentis “File E,” the missing link which contains a long letter from X to Prentis, Sr., threatening blackmail and confirming the truth of these events. Though Quinn and Prentis agree that what appears to be a conspiracy involving his father may really be a series of coincidences converted into treachery by the disgruntled X, they burn the file, leaving the past open to interpretation and conveyed by those traces contained within a memoir and a few scattered historical facts. Quinn retires, Prentis (now, no longer an “apprentice” at the retrieval and disposal of information) takes his place, and, in a final scene, Prentis describes an outing with his family where he establishes communication, at various levels, with his wife and sons. Seemingly, as Quinn appears to have intended, Prentis has come to terms with the possibility of his father’s imperfection and has found his proper place within the order of things.

The Characters

While Shuttlecock tells the story of a son’s recovery of his father’s “true past,” and while it is narrated in the son’s “voice,” Prentis is oddly impersonal about the personal and family crises which are woven throughout this tale of detection. As an information specialist, Prentis is interested in facts and the interpretation of fact: He is a hermeneutic scientist who has little room in his life for emotions. The clipped, matter-of-fact style of the narration suggests that, like his father, Prentis suffers from a form of catatonia which belies the closed, cheery ending of the novel, where he recounts the reunion with his family. In his move from apprentice to chief, Prentis, in a sense, becomes another Quinn, and this beginning of a successful career and a happier family life has quite sinister undertones: Like Quinn, Prentis will become a disseminator and destroyer of information, a dictator of fact.

On one level, it could be seen that Prentis (the autobiographical, confessional “I” who is the main—perhaps only—“character” of his own story) has been successfully initiated into a form of adulthood: In the end, he accepts the imperfections of the father, he takes over Quinn’s responsibilities, and he becomes a father again to his sons and a husband to his wife. In this psychological reading, Prentis has grown up because he is willing to accept the world as a place where good and evil, heroism and betrayal coexist and where judgments or values must be based on their mixture, rather than their separation.

Swift leaves open, however, the possibility of a quite different reading, wherein existence is seen as a form of repression. Prentis’ success and happiness are ultimately based on a suppression of knowledge (he never reads “File E” himself before it is burned, but he simply takes Quinn’s summary of it as truth); if he becomes another Quinn, then he assumes the role of a god-like authority in a fallen, human world who will often be in the position of dictating “what is good for the common man”; in the final scene, where he romps with his wife and children on the beach, one senses that Prentis, the narrator, is hiding something from the reader in this artificial portrait of the nuclear family reunited. Playing the role of the narrator, Prentis is unreliable precisely when he becomes chief of information, a job that requires the judicious suppression of the truth: The reader is left with the question, What form and quantity of truth does one receive in this cold confession?

Critical Context

Graham Swift has enjoyed quick recognition as one of the finest of a new generation of contemporary British novelists. Shuttlecock was awarded the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and Waterland (1983), a novel that reinvests the past with symbolic richness and power, was nominated for the prestigious Booker Prize. Swift is concerned in his work to reveal the possibilities for self-discovery in worlds that resist such efforts: While the narrator of Shuttlecock is, metaphorically, buried under piles of paper, the protagonist of Waterland is so overwhelmed by the forces of the natural world that personality is in danger of being consumed by nature. Swift appears to be a master of style as he shifts from the banality and flatness of Shuttlecock to the Iyricism and moodiness of Waterland: In both cases, there is a serious reflection on “knowledge” in several senses and on the human desire both to repress and to uncover what may be known. Like two British novelists of an older generation, John Fowles and William Golding, Swift creates fictive worlds replete with the uncertainties of modern existence and containing protagonists who, for better or worse, seek out whatever certainties lie therein.

Bibliography

Clemons, Walter. “A Swift Arrival,” in Newsweek. CV (June 24, 1985), p. 74.

The Observer. Review. September 13, 1981, p. 24.

Punch. Review. CCLXXXI (September 16, 1981), p. 483.