[Cocko]

Here's something from 1992:

In his fifth novel, Graham Swift again looks at the effects of past on present, a reoccurring theme central to at least two of his other works – the phenomenal Waterland and the disappointing Shuttlecock. In particular I loved Waterland, Swift’s intricate crafting of layers of narrative seamlessly weaves together stories hidden within stories, each intricate detail informing the reader’s understanding of the central characters. In the case of Waterland, spanning over 250 years of family history, that’s an impressive saga in anyone’s book.

Nevertheless, this is not about Waterland. Unfortunately, Ever After is more closely aligned with Shuttlecock, another of Swift’s novels that deals with a son’s dead father, his sense of loss and how answers can be found in the past. Ultimately this book left me flat, and in some ways it felt like a rewriting of Shuttlecock (interestingly, in both cases the father in question was a spy in WWII).

I suppose this can be the danger when clogging a novel with multiple stories, you fracture the readers attention and run the risk of spreading the interest thin. When it works it is powerful, when it doesn’t it feels laboured. I engaged with Bill’s relationship with his wife and parents, but I didn’t engage with the events surrounding his academic work or the story it unfolds. But maybe this is just a reaction to some very dense prose employed to explore the spiritual crisis at the novel’s centre, a type of language that never disrupted the conversational flow of Waterland. I guess this is another book that wanted to like much more than I did.

Still Swift is a great writer when he hits his mark, I particularly loved this short paragraph:

And I didn’t know I loved her till I’d dreamt of her. I didn’t know it was the real thing until an illusion had signalled it. Until she’d stepped out of her real existence into this other existence of which only I knew…