Graham Swift opens up

“Making an Elephant” by Graham Swift There is no less Swiftian writer than Graham Swift. Nine volumes of fiction, produced over three decades, have whispered into the ears of a loyal readership. The break-through came with “Waterland” (1983), a coming-of-age novel set in the Fens in wartime. In “Last Orders” (1996) four old lags ramble towards the Kent coast to dispose of a pal’s ashes. Narrated in a rich demotic, the book brought a double hoick in profile: both as Booker winner and as the catalyst for a plagiarism row arising from structural similarities to Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying”.

Sixty this year and after a lifetime of looking outwards for his stories, Swift breaks with monastic habit to reveal something of himself in “Making an Elephant”. It’s more than just a novelist’s non-fiction anthologised. Each entry is cued up with a careful preamble. There are conversations with elders and contemporaries, slices of memory about creative beginnings, thoughts on the filming of books, even some compact poems eked out in the cracks between novels.

A moving recollection of Swift’s suburban father is counterpointed by another of Ted Hughes, a father figure whom Swift knew not as poet laureate but as a rod-and-line man in Devon’s salmon-rich rivers. This aromatic portrait is almost anti-literary as, waist-deep in swirling currents, the writers contrive never to discuss writing. Such are the quirks of an insightful meditation on life and letters by a practitioner who mutters from the rooftops.

~ JASPER REES

Making an Elephant, now out from Picador