Understanding
Graham Swift
David Malcolm
Graham Swift has published to widespread acclaim since his literary debut in
1980. He has won an impressive array of literary prizes, including the 1996
B o o ker Prize, and three of his novels have been produced as films.
Understanding Graham Swift introduces readers to the entirety of the novelist’s
career, including his lesser-known short stories. Through close readings, David
Malcolm explains the central importance Swift places on the role of history in
human life—and on the difficulties of giving an adequate account of that history.
In separate chapters Malcolm considers each of Swift’s seven novels, from
The Sweet Shop Owner, published in 1980, through The Light of Day, published
in 2003. Malcolm explores Swift’s presentation of family conflict and emotional
and psychological disturbance, his use of complex narrative technique and genre
mixture, and his interest in metafictional issues. Malcolm underscores the novelist’s debt to earlier writers, most especially George Eliot, Charles Dickens, and
William Faulkner, and his recurrent concern with the lives of socially humble
characters.
Malcolm discusses the novelist’s use of major twentieth-century historical
events to shape and deform the lives of his characters; his focus on the distortions
and evasions that characterize the discussion of personal, local, and national
histories; and his fascination with the complexities, sufferings, and joys that
mark individual lives. Malcolm suggests that despite Swift’s dark vision of
human suffering, he tempers his writing with an intermittent focus on that which
can redeem our failures, our losses, and our cruelties.
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DAVID MALCOLM is a professor of
English literature at the University of
Gdansk. His books include Jean Rhys: A
Study of the Short Fiction; That
Impossible Thing: The British Novel,
1978–1992; and U n d e rstanding Ian
McEwan, published by the University of
South Carolina Press in 2002. Malcolm’s
translations of Polish and German poetry
and prose have been published in Great
Britain, Austria, and the United States.
Malcolm lives in Sopot, Poland.
UNDERSTANDING GRAHAM SWIFT
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