‘Book for book,’ John Banville is quoted as saying on the cover of this one, ‘[Graham] Swift is surely one of England’s finest novelists.’ This may be Irish for ‘but of course he hasn’t written all that much’, though eight novels and a collection of short stories isn’t bad going and it would be odd if work so ruminative and elegiac came out more quickly. If Swift seems costive by comparison with some of his contemporaries, in fact, it’s not that he has produced fewer novels but that he does very little other writing: hardly any journalism or criticism, no polemics. In this as in other respects he resembles his friend Kazuo Ishiguro, about whom he writes attentively in Making an Elephant, a collection of 18 miscellaneous pieces padded out with 30-odd rather lame poems and linked by an autobiographical commentary.
The piece on ‘Ish’ — an interview with an introduction — has interesting things to say about the writer’s work as well as his upbringing and is delivered on terms of equality. Elsewhere, Swift can seem oddly star-struck — by the charm, in private, of ‘Salman’, by the ease with which ‘Caz’ (Caryl Phillips) tempts those he likes into truancy. Still, he can be forgiven for boasting about his fishing expeditions with ‘Ted’ (Hughes), who supplies the book with a good joke:
The pools on salmon rivers can have atmospheric names, sometimes with a touch of poetry, known only to fishermen. Ted had stopped by a pool, clearly holding strong associations for him, where … a deep, salmon-detaining pot had been formed by the remains of a long-ago collapsed and overgrown concrete groyne. We asked him what the pool was called …. He continued to stare at the water and, with his slow Yorkshire vowels, said, ‘Concrete.’
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