Read on…

Graham Swift

Here We are and other novels

A REALLY good book is one that’s worth reading again, years later, and is just as interesting and enjoyable the second time. And a great book – a classic if you like – is one you can read several times and on each occasion take more from it.

One of my favourite writers is Graham Swift, who has just published his 10th novel.

He is perhaps best known for Waterland (1983), and Last Orders (1996), which won the Booker Prize that year. A wonderful film, faithful to the novel, was made of Last Orders, with a star cast of Michael Caine, Tom Courtenay, Helen Mirren, Bob Hoskins, Ray Winstone and David Hemmings.

I have recently been re-reading Graham Swift’s fiction and while I think those two novels are still his best, inventive and intriguing in their stories and how they are told, he is a consistently good writer and all his books stand the test of time.

Unlike many novelists he rarely draws on personal experiences for subject matter; nor are his characters based on people he knows. He once wrote: “If I have any abiding allegiance in my writing it is to the power of the imagination.” And a note at the end of Wish You Were Here states simply ‘This is a work of fiction.’

All his novels have a strong sense of time and place and all are set in England.

He explores relationships, especially within families and between parents and children, and themes of love, desire, tension, pain and loss run though most of his books. His characters’ pasts and the unreliability of memory are always important.

Each book takes a fresh subject, and has a clear narrator’s voice, or sometimes several narrators’ voices. There are no passages of purple prose; no pages of technical detail. Typically we are presented with a quietly unfolding story, often with something unexplained at its heart, that quickly grasps and then holds one’s attention. His writing is fluent and he is very readable.

His latest novel, Here We Are, is about three entertainers: a stage magician, his female assistant, and the compere of the show in which they perform at Brighton’s end of the pier theatre in the late 1950’s. It is evocative that world, of the period, and, through its backstories, of the war years too. And as the magician performs his illusions, Swift performs his own magic on the reader at the close of this story.

In addition to the novels mentioned above I recommend his first two books The Sweet-Shop Owner, and Shuttlecock; and also Wish You Were Here which I enjoyed much more on reading for a second time.

All of Swift’s fiction is available in Kindle editions, and is also available from online sellers.

Lance Christopher