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27Irina Popova Moscow State University
Just So Stories: On the novels of Graham Swift
ТАКИЕ ПРОСТЫЕ ИСТОРИИ: О РОМАНАХ ГРЭМА СВИФТА
Статья представляет обзор романного творчества Грэма Свифта (р. 1949 г.). В ней, с привлечением материала всех его романов, описываются сквозные темы произведений писателя: любовь, отношения детей и родителей, смерть, история. Затем рассматриваются ключевые методы и приёмы его работы с формой - такие, например, как псевдодокументальность и создание фантасмагорий, использование нескольких повествователей (вплоть до многоголосия «Последних распоряжений»), сдвиги временных пластов, аллюзивность.
I had been teaching Graham Swift’s Waterland to students specializing in British Literature for over a decade before I first saw the author. He appeared at a Moscow Bookfair early in July, 2006 mainly to present his most recent book The Light of Day, but also to meet his Russian readers and to have an informal question-answer session. Among the audience were some of my undergraduates as well as my friends who had read Swift in translation. We all agreed that we were quite surprised to see a person so similar to what the author Graham Swift might expected to be - modest, slightly reticent, tolerant and full of human charm.
His two first novels (The Sweet Shop Owner, 1980, and Shuttle cock,\9 81) and a number of short stories had already been published, but it was only during his work on Waterland that he really believed that he was a writer: “A sudden confidence was there which hadn’t been there before. One is never sure in the middle of writing, and you never know what you have done, but at
the time I thought that Waterland was going to be special.”8. He remembers how after the success of Waterland he was for the first time invited to a major literary gathering in London: when he appeared, it seemed to him that all those present stared as if in surprise not to see a man in Wellington boots with a pail full of eels. In fact, he says, he has never been interested in writing about what he knew from experience or learnt through research. He ‘invented’ his Fens solely out of the landscape he used to see in his undergraduate days passing them on a London-Cambridge train: “I find research very tedious. I try not to do research - if I can get away with guesswork, I’ll do that... I do it the wrong way around. If there’s something factual that has got to go into the fictional context, I will, so far s I can, just leave a gap and do the missing part at the end.” 9
In 1988 he published Out of This World, in 1991 - Ever After, both novels returning, after the fantasy and large scale of Waterland, to the exploration of more personal and narrow worlds; both novels experimenting with form. Swift’s really brilliant success was Last Orders (1996), his Booker Prize novel, where the span of human lives and events is as large as in Waterland. Yet Last Orders, with its dia- and polylogues, with its introduction of a London dialect, is a new technical achievement in the author’s career. Swift’s most recent novel is Tomorrow (2007).
“To love is to be ready to lose - isn’t it? It’s not to have, it’s not to keep It’s to put someone else’s happiness before yours”. Thus speaks the main female character in The Light of Day. All Swift’s novels are about love (even though none of them is a romance or truly a love-story). The presence of love shines, like a bright autumnal sun in The Light of Day, upon very ordinary and often sad lives of his characters; shines upon the dull or even tragic settings:
8 Triumph of the Common Man. The Guardian, 1st March 2003).
9 (Interview with Graham swift by Adam Begley, April, 1992. http://www.bookpage.com/
the flat monotonous Fens - the Waterland - breeding melancholy, alcoholism, suicide; a psychiatric clinic (,Shuttlecock); a hospital death-bed {Last Orders); a prison visitors’ room (The Light of Day). The presence of love ultimately sanctifies relations clearly non-righteous - like those between Amy and Ray in Last Orders. Love makes Swift’s characters understand and forgive harder sins, and feel compassion for the sinners. Thus Prentice in Shuttlecock, having guessed that his glorious war-hero of a father actually betrayed his French comrades to the Gestapo, thinks about the terrible tortures which turned the brave man into a traitor - and feels compassion. Thus Tom Crick in Waterland feels compassion for his childless wife who in a fit of madness kidnapped a baby. Thus George in The Light of Day, a private detective, feels compassion for Sara who stabbed her husband. Love in Swift’s world is so powerful a presence that his otherwise sad stories crowded with joyless situations, are never felt as hopeless. Just the other way round.
In the culture of the late twentieth century and at the turn of the Millennium -i.e. in the so-called postmodernist culture -Graham Swift, alongside other first-rate British authors (such as Julian Barnes, Peter Ackroyd, Ian McEwan, A.S.Byatt, David Lodge), does consciously or unconsciously disprove the Theory. According to the apostles of the latter - the most Godless and staunchest of whom is Jean Baudrillard - we have long been living in the world of the de-valued values, of second-hand truths, in the world where everything did already happen many times and so has lost its original high meanings. Love in such a world - is nothing but an image of love (or, to use the language of the Theory, a simulacrum), and so is the Child, and so is Death. History is also a fake: since we can never know how it all really was, history is kind of non-existent. Love, children, death, history are Graham Swift’s major recurring themes. Love, children, death, history are the notions with which he refuses to play the postmodernist game. He gives them back their old human meanings.
Among all kinds of love Swift shows the olden-days romantic
love as still non-extinct. It is the only and true love not perishable under any circumstances. Such is the love of Tom Crick for the girl Mary, later his wife; the love of Bill Unwin for his late wife (Ever After); possibly the love at first sight and for life which Ray feels for the wife of his best friend (Last Orders); such love is granted to the no-longer-young George with his experience of a long and, as it proved, loveless marriage (The Light of Day). Vicious and deadly, according to Swift, are false relations once mistakenly taken for love. Such is the marriage of the Sweet Shop Owner and, probably, of Prentice in Shuttlecock. Ray is left by his wife who seems to have stayed with him just for the sake of their growing daughter. George’s wife, after many years of marriage, leaves him ruthlessly without even looking back once he loses his job: her reaction is devoid of understanding, there is 110 place in it for love or compassion.
Another kind of love explored in all Swift’s novels is the love between parents and children. It is difficult to restrain here from a biographical reference: the author himself is not a parent which he explains by the difficulties he observes in his friends’ families.10 The title hero of his first novel, The Sweet Shop Owner, is dying of a heart condition, expecting his daughter with whom his relationship deteriorated long ago. The hero of Shuttlecock declares cold war to his young sons; it is hard to tell who would have won, had not the hero half-revealed his own father’s awful secret. Water land touches upon this subject with a difference: the theme mutates here as an incest love of a father for a daughter; as a step-father’s tolerant and all-forgiving love for an idiot-boy; as a teacher’s quest for a kind of a spiritual son in one of his pupils (the Ulysses - Telemachus, or Bloom - Dedalus theme). In Out of This World both main narrators, Harry and Sophie, develop love-hate relations with their fathers. In Ever After the hero is remembering his past trying to re-create and re-live his relations with his father and step-father. Last Orders
10 (See Rosenburg Glowing in the Ashes, www.salon.com/weeklv/swiftl).
show multifarious aspects of parents-children relations, mostly unhappy ones . In The Light of Day , on the contrary, George manages to treat his grown-up daughter as a friend and a solace. He did go through her teen-age alienation and unruliness and has learnt to understand and accept her unonditionally and to value her warm support.
Death is also present in all Swift’s novels. The hero of his first novel is dying of a severe angina fit. In his next novels some characters either die or are ready for death. In Out of This World unexpected deaths strike the two most important people in the lives of the two main narrators. Death in this novel is also conspicuously present as massacre, which makes the twentieth century historical background: it is World War I, it is World War II, it is the Nuremberg Trials. Then it is the Vietnam war and the Falklands. The hero of Ever After, after the death of his wife, his only love, tries to commit suicide. He remembers how his father (or the man he thought his father) killed himself when he found out about his successful rival, Bill’s future step-father. Bill has no one now to ask what and how it was really like. That slipping of history from facts into the domain of guesses and versions seems to support the postmodernist point concerning the vanishing of history. Graham Swift, though, puts his meaningful accents differently.
The core of the story and the title theme of Last Orders is a ride of four men from Bermondsey, a London district on the South Bank, to Margate, a seaside place in Kent. Their aim is to carry out the last will of their friend, neighbour, foster-father: to spread his ashes out from the Margate pier. Yet another illustration of the death-theme is one of the major episodes in The Light of Day. George brings roses to the grave of the man he hates, then he observes a series of funerals and thinks of them. In this late novel, similarly to the earlier Waterland, one of the key points is a murder. However different the murderers, the murdered and their situations are, the profound motives of the two crimes are similar: the betrayal of love which seemed true.
The theme “life-in-death” is yet another variation of Swift’s
treatment of death. The father in Shuttlecock quits normal life and lives on in a psychiatric clinic saying nothing, recognizing nobody. It is clear, or at least implicitly clear, that the reason of his escape is a shameful blemish in his heroic past. It is not clear, though, whether the man’s derangement is really true because of the shock of the possible exposure or is just a conscious simulation in order to prevent the disgraceful investigation. A similar situation is dealt with in respect to Sara Atkinson in Waterland'. no one learnt if she really got mad because of her husband’s jealous violence or was just shocked by his behaviour to the extent that made her simulate madness as a way of defense. Poor Dick, the vegetable-head, also lives a claustrophobic life-in-death even though he seems free and capable of love and murder. Further and further away into her own mad world and into “hearing voices” moves Mary Crick, the only love of the hero of Waterland. June, a born idiot in Last Orders, has lived for fifty years in an asylum, knowing neither the world nor even her devoted mother. In The Light of Day Sara destines herself to a prison term; after the tragic experience life would seem deadly to her in any case - her hope for coming back to the light of day is George’s true love.
One of Graham Swift’s major interests is history. It is the grand history of historic events and historic persons. It is also a variety of minor histories - an individual history, a family history, a local history. All these histories are intertwined in his novels. Defining the most important theme of his works he says that it is “an interest in how the past informs the present”(BookPage, op. cit.). In fact his stories are also about how the past forms the present. Among the grand history’s events the main one for Swift is World War II, its presence is apparent in all his novels. Born after the war he remembers how the family used to pack their holiday things in parachute bags. His father, he says, an ex-fighter-pilot, “would have put a parachute in this bag and it might have saved his life. So the Second World War, which I never went through, has been my great history lesson.”(Triumph of the Common Man, op.
The experience of the War is the basis of the main plot of Shuttlecock. The narrator’s father, the heroic Shuttlecock, many times secretly flies to France to co-ordinate the anti-German actions of the Resistance and to help the future British operations after the D-day. Just before the Germans’ retreat he is caught by the Gestapo. In his memoir he describes in detail all the hardships of the prison, the horrors of the interrogations, his preparations for the unbelievably difficult - and yet successful - escape. All his life after the war is lived in the rays of glory. This glory and nearly superman courage of the father have always oppressed the son. The past forms the present. It proves, though, that the father’s past and, then, his famous memoir might have been lies. Now, suspicion of the father’s weakness frees the son to become at last a really adult husband and parent. Again, the past forms the present.
The phrase cause and effects keeps recurring in Waterland. It is not the war here that is the cause of everything, even though its presence is felt. Still, in this novel another past forms the present. It is the past history of a flat marshy land and of making canals and dams to drain it - “to reclaim the land from water”; it is the family histories of the the protagonist-narrator’s ancestors; it is the personal history of Tom Crick, of his father suffering amnesia after shell-shock in the First World War, of his mother, of the last Atkinson imagining that his great love for his daughter will produce a new saviour, of Tom’s relations with his idiot brother Dick and with Mary Metcalf. All those histories form the present of the main character, a teacher of history in a London school. In accordance with the curriculum, Tom ought to be telling his pupils about the French Revolution of the late eighteenth century. Yet in his speeches addressed to the class - actually made, as it seems, only inside his mind - he keeps returning to the paramount importance of some other history consisting, unlike the grand history of the historic events, in private personal histories, sometimes imagined.
In Out of This World, the First World War is within the living memory of the Beech family: one of its members, a budding
scholar, was killed, another lost his arm. The past forms the present: the armless Robert Beech becomes an arms magnate to spite fate and the Germans. Victory in the Second World War was possible due to the arms industry. Yet the chain of cause and effect does not stop, nor does grand history stop being inseparable from the characters’ personal histories.
All the main characters of Last Orders have the experience of the Second World War. Jack, Ray, Vic, Lenny were enlisted and participated in the military actions; the life-long friendship between Jack and Ray started in Northern Africa when the British were preparing to stop Rommel’s advance. Amy saved the baby Vince during the bombing of London. In the time of peace all those people go on with their everyday lives and work, only their present-day lives were formed by the past, often by the historic past. It is no crazy whim on the part of Jack to ask his friends to throw his ashes into the sea in Margate. He used to take his family and Lenny’s daughter Sally to Margate on Sundays (a fact of his personal history). Yet Margate is a historic place as well: during the Second World War it was Margate where the German troops’ landing was largely expected - hence the remains of the defense ferro-concrete structures in the sea.
There are three of Swift’s novels, though, in which it is not the War that provides a larger-scale background for personal histories. The historical background of Waterland is a few centuries of a marshy area in the East of England, of making canals, dams and sluices, of many floods, of catching eels, of murdering Dutch engineers - in other words, the history of fight between land and water. In Ever After the hero gets interested in his Victorian ancestor representing the whole epoch with its searches and doubts, its discoveries and delusions, with its Darwinism and approaching atheism. This introduction of the Victorian background, so popular among British authors of the last decades of the twentieth century, naturally creates many intertextual echoes: first and foremost, one thinks of The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles and also of Possession and Angels and Insects by A.S.Byatt. In The Light of
Day the historical parallel to the present-day story is the English exile of Napoleon III and the ex-empress Eugenie’s long widowhood. The word parallel may in fact be not quite accurate here, since Graham Swift never employs any straightforward parallels. He rather uses very fine and nearly elusive historical allusions which help the reader’s response to the psychological complexities of his stories.
“I can’t stress this enough: one writes fiction because one doesn’t want to write fact. Fact is involved in fiction, but what drives you is the exercise of imagination.” (BookPage, op. cit.). More than that: Graham Swift has claimed a number of times that he writes about what he has not made personal knowledge of - this is the condition for making imagination free. Thus, the stimulus for writing Waterland was a landscape he saw out of the train window: it provoked him to write a history of the land - mostly invented (it is no accidence that the phrase to tell stories recurs throughout the novel). So just to see that flat land crossed by many rivers and canals proved enough for writing one of the major English novels of the last century. “That’s what’s exciting, getting from what you know into what you don’t know.’’(BookPage, op. cit.). He lets the imagination play and grow to some vivid grotesques, culminating in the creation of the “Coronation Ale” and its immediate and longterm effects.
It is true though that the settings of all Swift’s novels include London, especially the South Bank areas - i.e. the places where, apart from his university years, he has lived all his life. He often mentions commons - again, the places he frequents: he says that it is easier for him to think while walking than at the desk. Still, these London places, so well known to him, will certainly have in his stories some fantastic counterbalances, some imagined places alongside the familiar ones, or else some extraordinary events in the everyday familiar settings. Thus, the protagonist and narrator of Shuttlecock lives in Clapham, one of the South Bank areas, he daily walks from home to the Tube across Clapham Common, to the same
Common he tries in vain to get his children - to play outdoors instead of watching TV. He works though in a certain Police Archives of unclosed cases - it is the place gloomy and fantastic, depicted in a somewhat Dickensian manner. There is a window in the ceiling through which the young employees are watched by the Senior Archivist - in the beginning he looks like a recognizable Dickens’ villain. Some files keep mysteriously vanishing from the Archive, so the protagonist together with the reader suspect some detective plot and villainy. Here, like elsewhere in his works, Graham Swift demonstrates his skills in creating suspense, although neither suspense nor crime make his stories truly detective. The Chief Archivist (whose name is Quinn - can it be an allusion to Agatha Christie’s Mysterious Mr.Quinn ?) in the end proves to be the opposite to what he looked like and we see Swift’s version of an eccentric humanist: Quinn concientiously removes those Archive files which might bring much unhappiness to the living relatives. Invited by Quinn to dinner, the protagonist gets into a realistically respectable London suburbs, yet Quinn’s home will again remind us of Dickens - this time of Wemmick from Great Expectations. Just like Wemmick, Quinn at home is opposite to his mask which he wears at work and which is taken for his true face (if unlike Wemmick he hasn’t got an “aged parent” he makes his home a paradise for cats). Yet another grotesque is the scene of burning in Quinn’s garden of the Archive files concerning the hero’s father.
The characters of Last Orders live in a not very wealthy or respectable Southern district of London. They are regulars of the local pub (hence the pun on the title, non-existent in the Russian translation - “last orders” is the landlord’s announcement of the approaching closing time), they all have some small businesses in the area. But all of a sudden the realistic story bursts out with fantasy and grotesque: Vic, whose family for generations has owned the local funeral services, remembers how once he had so many corpses that he couldn’t make them ready for their relatives’ farewell visits; so he rushed to Jack’s shop across the street, and Jack did help him since he knew his butcher’s job. Or, Ray
remembers a whore-house in Cairo where Jack took him and where he lost his virginity - again, the situation is wholly imagined and represented with humour verging on the grotesque (its comedy reminding of Evelyn Waugh).
In The Light of Day the detective George asks himself where his client’s husband could make love to the Croatian girl. He switches on his imagination and sees a place seemingly impossible for a respectable well-to-do middle-aged doctor - the shrubberies in the Commons.
Graham Swift’s paradox is that he has a knack of being very realistic when he depicts something purely imagined (the best example is the everyday lives and events in the Fens). On the other hand, he does not seem very eager to remain within the limits of true-to-life scenerios and people really known to him; so his London and Londoners are conspicuously and brightly coloured with the play of his fantasy.
It must be for the same reason - not to write of what he knows from personal experience - that he usually makes his main characters and narrators much older than himself. The Sweet Shop Owner of his first novel is rather elderly and dying - the author was not yet thirty at the time; Tom Crick, the creation of the author of just over thirty, is in his fifties and has to accept early retirement; Harry Beech, one of the two major narrators in Out of This World, is over sixty; most of the main characters-narrators in Last Orders are around seventy. It is also quite usual for his characters to belong to a different social group or status or environment, even to have a totally different background - in other words, to belong to strata of which he does not have first-hand knowledge. The only exceptions are Tom Crick, Harry Beech and Bill Unwin.
Striving to imagine other lives, different from his own, is all-powerful in Graham Swift. He says that he does not use any autobiographical material - he is interested in fiction, not in facts. More than that, the author’s voice is never there in his novels, from the start he has trusted the narration to one of his characters. In Out
of This World there are two main narrators, we have many chapters titled either “Harry” or “Sophie” (in this novel even without those titles the voices and individual styles of the father and daughter would be recognizable); one of the chapters is a memoir-interior-monologue of Sophie’s husband; yet another chapter demonstrates a bold device: it is a voice from the non-being, a letter or an interior monologue of the long dead Anna, Harry’s wife and Sophie’s mother. Last Orders shows the narration bursting out into seven voices, five of which belong to Jack’s friends, his foster-son (carrying out Jack’s last will) and to his widow; all those voices are given chapters titled with their names, even though the single chapter of Vince (the foster-son) consists of just two words. The sixth voice is that of Mandy, Jack’s daughter-in-law, it is just one chapter; the seventh is the voice of the dead Jack. The chapters titled with the names of the narrators are occasionally interspersed with the chapters titled as place-names - from Bermondsey , the starting point of the journey (the first chapter) to Margate, the destination (two chapters at the end). Those ‘geographical’ chapters are not interior monologues, but still have their own narrator - it is Ray, one of the carriers of Jack’s ashes; from time to time Ray reproduces his fellow-travellers’ conversation turning parts of the text into dramatic pieces (here Swift demonstrates his brilliance as a dialogue-writer).
The language of Last Orders on the whole reproduces the London ‘vulgata’ (low colloquial speech) making just a few changes to help the transcribing. It is clearly not the author’s language, it is the language of his characters, even when they speak inside their minds. And it is yet another Graham Swift’s brilliant novelty.
Here a short digression is worth making to mention that one Australian professor tried to accuse Swift of plagiarism. The professor noted the similarities between Last Orders and William Faulkner’s novel As I Lay Dying and drew attention to the similar device: ’’The resemblance goes down to small details, including the
use of first names as chapter headings, the use of a one-sentence chapter, the attribution of one chapter to a dead person, and the organization of a chapter by enumerated points.’’(quoted from: Triumph of the Common Man, op. cit.). Swift was immediately supported by literary men. Thus, Kasuro Ishiguro, also a Booker winner, wrote: "Last Orders does no more than what countless books, movies, paintings and musical works have always done, and will continue to do, that is, to allude to an established classic for its own purposes.”(ib.).
Last Orders seems to be, among all Graham Swift’s novels, the richest in literary allusions, its intertextual quality is by no means limited to references to Faulkner. Thus, the reviews mentioned that the characters’ journey is a kind of pilgrimage; add to that their stop at Canterbury, and the allusion to Chaucer is bound to be clear. Some allusions to T.S.Eliot’s The Waste Land have also been pointed out. For instance, Margate evokes the lines: “On Margate Sands./1 can connect/ Nothing with nothing.”. The title of the novel reminds the reader of the famous pub-scene in Eliot’s poem with its refrain “HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME”. We could also observe that at the end of the journey Swift’s characters dip their hands in turn into the urn and throw handfuls of ashes into the sea. ‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust’ - the line from The Waste Land which immediately comes to mind. Yet another ‘handful of dust’ may be remembered - the novel by Evelyn Waugh.
In The Light of Day Swift seems to have taken a kind of timeout to have some rest from the fantasy and formal experiments of his previous works. He returns here to his earlier experience of a single narrator and creates a melodrama.The only formal play in the novel is time shifts, the constant switching-off from the present to the past - to the near past as well as to the far-away, or very faraway, past. This shuttle-like movement of the events in time makes a major properties of all Swift’s stories. The reader is first informed of some effects of some past mistaken actions or sins or crimes of
the characters - be it the solitary dying of the Sweet Shop Owner vainly waiting for his daughter, or the seeming madness of the exhero Shuttlecock, or the being of Dick - the idiot-boy, or the childlessness and madness of Mary Crick, or George’s visit to the cemetery and the on-coming visit to the prison. Then very slowly the reader comes to guess about the causes, making all those different time planes and past causes into a whole picture. This method of storytelling is the grounds for Swift’s suspense, for his making serious literature entertaining.
