by Graham Swift
In the evenings a little hotel band would strike up its medley of what must have been mildly jazzed up versions of old trench songs. He watched the dancing like some old buffer tolerating the ways of a frivolous young world.
I don’t even remember the name of the hotel. Or the names of those places we drove to in the rain. My thoughts were on that astonishing aerial journey and the equally astonishing one we would have to make back. And he must have somehow appreciated this. As we waited to board for the return trip, he slipped away momentarily and reappeared with the hint of a gleam in his eye which was not, for once, a piece of public play-acting but a genuine, faltering attempt at fatherliness. I don’t know where this fondness came from, but it seems, as I recall it, that there was something valedictory about it, as if he knew, even then, how the gap between us would only widen further.
A moment later a steward, with a knowing look, ushered us through a doorway, and we followed him across the tarmac to the waiting plane. Standing by its ponderous, uptilted fuselage and dressed in the outlandish costume, goggles and all, which was then de rigueur for airline crew, was no less a person than the pilot. And in no time, while Dad waited below, this same fancy-dress pilot had somehow whisked me up behind the huge, bristling, forward engine and sat me down amidst an array of instruments which would now seem impossibly archaic but which seemed to me then like the very stuff of the future.
I was entranced, Sophie. Entranced.
Perched beside that pilot in that ancient Argosy, I almost forgot my father standing beneath us on the tarmac. It was as if he had pushed me forward into this wondrous outlook on the sky, had made me a present of it, then discreetly withdrawn. I might soar away; he would remain. And though he had staged it all (slipping a coin into the steward’s hand: Yes, of course, no trouble, no trouble at all for Major Beech, v.c), perhaps he was aware, himself, of being only half present. I can see now that throughout that homeward journey his feet must have been, so to speak, still on the ground, still caught in the mud. And I was being lifted up and away, out of his world, out of the age of mud, out of that brown, obscure age, into the age of air.
ALSO BY GRAHAM SWIFT
Making an Elephant
Tomorrow
The Light of Day
Last Orders
Ever After
Out of This World
Waterland
Learning to Swim
Shuttlecock
The Sweet-Shop Owner
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
GRAHAM SWIFT was born in 1949 in London, where he still lives and works. He is the author of eight previous novels: The Sweet-Shop Owner; Shuttlecock, which received the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize; Waterland, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize and won the Guardian Fiction Award, the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, and the Italian Premio Grinzane Cavour; Out of This World; Ever After, which won the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger; Last Orders, which was awarded the Booker Prize; The Light of Day; and, most recently, Tomorrow. He is also the author of Learning to Swim, a collection of short stories, and Making an Elephant, a book of essays, portraits, poetry, and reflections on his life in writing. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages.
ALSO BY GRAHAM SWIFT
THE LIGHT OF DAY
On the anniversary of a life-shattering event, George Webb, a former policeman turned private detective, revisits the catastrophes of his past and reaffirms the extraordinary direction of his future. Two years before, an assignment to follow a strayed husband and his mistress appeared simple enough, but this routine job left George a transformed man. Suspenseful, moving, and hailed by critics as a detective story unlike any other, The Light of Day is a gripping tale of murder and redemption, as well as a bold exploration of love and self-discovery.
Fiction/Literature
LAST ORDERS
Four men—friends, most of them, for half a lifetime—gather in a London pub. They have taken it upon themselves to carry out the last orders of Jack Dodds, master butcher, and deliver his ashes to the sea. As they drive toward the fulfillment of their mission, their errand becomes an extraordinary journey into their collective and individual pasts. Braiding these men’s voices—and that of Jack’s mysteriously absent widow—into a choir of secret sorrow and resentment, passion and regret, Graham Swift creates a testament to a changing England and to enduring mortality.
Fiction/Literature
THE SWEET-SHOP OWNER
This flawlessly constructed and deeply compassionate novel is set during a single June day in the life of an outwardly unremarkable man whose inner world proves to be exceptionally resonant. As he tends to his customers, Willy Chapman, the sweet-shop owner, confronts the specters of his beautiful and distant wife and his clever, angry daughter, the history through which he has passed, and the great, unrequited passion that has tormented and redeemed him for forty years.
Fiction/Literature
EVER AFTER
Dazzling in its structure and shattering in its emotional force, Ever After spans two centuries and settings from the adulterous bedrooms of postwar Paris to contemporary entanglements in the groves of academe. It is the story of Bill Unwin, a man haunted by the death of his beautiful wife and a survivor himself of a recent brush with mortality. And although it touches on Darwin and dinosaurs, bees and bridge builders, the true subject of Ever After is nothing less than the eternal question, “Why should things matter?” as pondered by both Bill Unwin and his Victorian ancestor, whose private notebooks reveal a quest for truth that bears eerie—and ultimately heartbreaking—parallels to Unwin’s own.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-74026-1
OUT OF THIS WORLD
Out of This World interweaves the history of a blighted family with the tragic and ludicrous history of the twentieth century. Its alternating narrators are a father and daughter—each obsessed with the other and irrevocably estranged—surveying their losses and grievances on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Their voices are unforgettable, their hurts terribly moving, and their vision of our era, like Swift’s itself, shocking and terribly persuasive.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-74032-2
SHUTTLECOCK
Prentis, the narrator of this nightmarish masterpiece, catalogs “dead crimes” for a branch of the London Police Department and suspects that he is going crazy. His files keep vanishing. His boss subjects him to cryptic taunts. His family despises him. And as Prentis desperately tries to hold on to the scraps of his sanity, he uncovers a conspiracy of blackmail and betrayal that extends from his department and into the buried past of his father, a war hero codenamed “Shuttlecock”—and, lately, a resident of a hospital for the insane. At once a fiendishly devious mystery and a profound reckoning of the debts that bind sons to fathers, Shuttlecock is a brilliantly accomplished work of fiction.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-73933-3
LEARNING TO SWIM
And Other Stories
The men and women in these spare, almost Kafkaesque stories are engaged in struggles that are no less brutal because they are fought by proxy. The mismatched couple in the title story wages a covert, sexually charged battle for the allegiance of their hapless son. An aging doctor punishes a hypochondriacal patient for his wife’s adultery. A teenage refugee is swept up in the conflict between an oppressively sentimental father and his rebellious son. In Graham Swift’s taut prose, these quietly combative relationships become a microcosm for all human cruelty and need.
Fiction/Short Stories
WATERLAND
Set in the bleak Fen country of East Anglia and spanning some two hundred and forty years in the lives of its haunted narrator and his ancestors, Waterland is a book that takes in eels and incest, ale-making and madness, the heartless sweep of history, and a family romance as tormented as any in Greek tragedy.
Fiction/Literature
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