SHAUN DE WAAL speaks to Graham Swift, who won the 1996 Booker Prize, and is visiting South Africa
THE latest “international” (that is, not South African) author to visit the country is Graham Swift, winner of the 1996 Booker Prize for his novel Last Orders, published by Picador. He follows other recent guests who have made contact with their (potential) readers at signings and literary breakfasts, lunches or dinners.
Swift and I met in the salubrious surroundings of Sandton’s Michelangelo Hotel, on a day whose weather was more English than African. He expressed some wonderment at the way meals at upper-end restaurants have become a favoured South African method of presenting writers to the public. It seemed to fit, we agreed regretfully, with the way in which books in this country have become costly luxury items.
I probed his views on the future of literature in general, and he expressed his optimism that books – and novels in particular – would continue to provide their unique pleasures and enlightenments in a decreasingly bookish world.
“The novel is a wonderful thing – it can do so many things,” said Swift, and one of the things novels do particularly well is to depict the passing of time, and the effects of that passage on individual lives.
Last Orders is about the journey made by four men to dispose of the ashes of someone they have known all their lives. As the novel traces their trip, using as narration the internal voices of the protagonists, the reader becomes aware of how interconnected these lives are, how inextricable they are from one another.
“He’s part of all the others,” says Swift of Jack, the dead man whose urned ashes move from the keeping of one character to another as the journey advances. “They were all part of Jack, as well as part of each other.”
The past is always, inescapably, with Swift’s characters. With what seems a characteristic narrative movement, he has them circle around certain key happenings, returning repeatedly to the events that made them what they are. These are the personal histories that stand in a strange relation to history – or History – as a vast pageant of world-changing events.
Waterland, hitherto Swift’s most famous novel (and one of those word-of-mouth novels that is frequently recommended), dramatises this opposition particularly well, as Tom Crick, a history teacher on his way out of his job, contrasts in his memories and his impromptu divagations to his class the many, various histories of which he is made, of which we all are made. He speaks of the French Revolution, but also of local dynasties gone awry, of the sexlife of the eel, of the swampy Fenland that must be reclaimed from the water by constant pumping.
“It’s about little worlds versus big worlds,” says Swift. “We all belong to little worlds, local worlds. Anyone who thinks he or she belongs only to the big world out there is a rarity, and a fool.”
The littlest world to which each person can belong is that of his or her own selfhood, his or her own consciousness, and that is what novels are particularly good at dramatising; in fact, they can make a whole cosmos of it. The novel has always had a pseudo-biographical or autobiographical strain, from Don Quixote to Robinson Crusoe and on through David Copperfield and the like. Swift’s work is in that tradition, focusing on individual lives, showing the contingencies that have formed them.
Thus he tends to employ older protagonists, people casting their inner gaze back on whole lifetimes. “I’m drawn to older people because they have a larger stock of memory,” he says. “Their whole existence can be evoked. The novel can then provide a sense of what a whole life adds up to or doesn’t add up to.”
Like many readers, I found the world of the Fens evoked so vividly in Waterland that I had to wonder whether Swift himself comes from that soggy region. Laughing, he says his own background is much closer to the South London world depicted in Last Orders: “It’s all very close to home.”
“The only journey I had to make was to another human being,” he says, noting that writing fiction is a way of “trying to be someone else”. And that process, even if it deals with people in a milieu with which one is deeply familiar, is a voyage of discovery. As Swift says, “Fiction is all about a journey from known to unknown territory.”
You can hear Swift speak today -May 30 -at a literary lunch at Cape Town’s Rozenhof restaurant. Phone (021) 462-4688 for details