Volume 39, Number 11 · June 11, 1992
Blood Ties
By Hilary Mantel
Ever After
by Graham Swift
Knopf, 275 pp., $21.00
It seems to be a convention that when you are writing about Graham Swift, somewhere in the first paragraph or two you refer to 'Waterland, his best book.' It would be a great thing to kick over the traces and declare Waterland a mere bagatelle beside Swift's new novel; unfortunately, that is impossible. So, let us have it over with. Swift's third novel was set in the east of England, in the Fens. Its narrator, a history teacher, brooded on his family, his adolescence, on the influences that created him. Stories of his own locality were interwoven with stories of the great world, and the patterns of the past informed every event. Waterland was a book which both reassured and captivated the reader by its exact sense of place and the solidity of its physical world: a moving meditation on the meaning of landscape and history, carefully if not elegantly written, exact and well-arranged; a book both modest and luminous.
Review, 3277 words
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