Graham Swift (1) (1949–)

Ruminative. So ruminative. Jack and Ellie grew up on neighboring dairy farms in very out-of-the-way North Devon. They both lost their mothers, the dairy cow business went to hell what with the BSE and then hoof and mouth disease, and the only recompense they had in their teenage and young adult years was each other. Lest this sound at all romantic in some sense, it's not very; Jack is the slow silent type without much to say, but it all works well enough. At least for Jack.

Ellie, though satisfied with Jack, is much less satisfied with dairy cow farming in Devon. Which seems a perfectly logical place to have arrived. A fortuitous inheritance finds her in possession of a vacation spot on the Isle of Wight and she convinces Jack to swap out livelihoods, complete with summer trips to the Caribbean. But as it turns out, you can take the slow silent dairy farmer out of the dairy farm, but you can't take the dairy farm out of the slow silent dairy farmer.

When Jack's little brother Tom, who ran off from the farm to join the army on his 18th birthday, is reported dead in Iraq by that army, all the tensions and contradictions of "Jack and Ellie on the Isle of Wight with summers in the Caribbean" are brought to crisis. Ellie can't bring herself to go back to the past. Jack gets swallowed up by it in his grief. The reader is stewed in it, marinated, turned over, and pulled out at last to face the possible violence of its conclusion.

It's a very well constructed and well written novel, illustrating violence - both literal and figurative - done by the modern world to men who once would have taken their place in a solid and traditional society that is suddenly no more. I liked it, but didn't love it.… (mere)

I first read this novel shortly after the paperback edition was released, almost forty years ago. It had been included in the previous year’s Booker Prize shortlist, and most of the reviews had been appropriately enthusiastic. I had just started in my first proper job, and was revelling in the awareness that, after years of student penury, I could now occasionally take a chance on buying a book on a whim, rather than having to weigh up every purchase against the risk of Micawberesque misery.

And what a book! In just over three hundred pages, Graham Swift offers the reader a history of East Anglia, including insights into political strife, land reclamation, flood management, the finer points of brewing, the beguiling mysteries of the eel, the culmination of the Cold War in the early 1980s, a love story, a murder, and a cautionary tale about incest, all wrapped up in a fascinating exegesis of the nature of history itself.

Tom Crick is, for the moment, Head of History at a large comprehensive school in London, beset with domestic challenges and facing strenuous effort by his headteacher to close his department. His Sixth Form lessons have, however, bucked the trend in which disaffected pupils move away from the humanities. His lessons are swell, because word has spread among the pupils of a new approach to teaching in which Crick’s lessons are suffused with vivid recollections from his own childhood. Crick’s pupils are dejected, convinced that the world is on the brink of a final nuclear war. Forty years earlier, Crick had been growing up in Norfolk during the Second World War, where his father was a lock-keeper responsible for vital flood management in that low lying land, contending with rationing and watching regular bombing missions taking off from the air force bases spread all around the county.

Swift takes his readers through numerous flashbacks, showing how Crick’s family had come to live by the river, and painting the history of the region. The flat landscape, and numerous waterways of the region play a key part in setting the atmosphere of the story. Swift’s prose is as clear as the water in Crick’s father’s lock, and his mastery of the multiple strands of the story is immense. He merges folklore with history, and manage the cast of characters deftly.

I can’t remember which book actually won the Booker Prize when this was a challenger – it must have been jolly good to have beaten this.… (mere)

Gave this up pretty quickly. I attempted the audio version, so perhaps it translates poorly in that format, but the style made the story entirely impossible to comprehend. I kept checking my ipod to see if it was skipping chapters because there seemed to be no coherent narrative. Just as I thought I had grasped whatever the protagonist was rattling on about, the focus and topic seemed to shift to something else. Perhaps some people find this sort of storytelling gymnastics compelling, but it felt like trying to carry on a conversation with someone suffering from profound dementia.… (mere)