‘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.
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