Out of This World by Graham Swift (1988)

  This was a difficult book to get in to, to be honest. I loved his novel, Waterland, and I was excited to read this as a result. This one is simply not as good. (Well played marketing department for that front cover!)

 It is peripatetic on many fronts. Geographically, I found myself in America, England, Greece, Germany, Vietnam, and France amongst other locations, but without much of an authentic “feel” for those locations. Greece might be an exception, at a stretch. From a temporal standpoint, the novel bounces between events bookended by the death of Queen Victoria (1901) and the Falklands war (1982), but never in a linear fashion. There is even a reference to the Bronze Age that ties England and Greece in a quirky way. The various family crises engage both microcosmic and macrocosmic issues in that the Beech family endures death by car bomb, infidelity, and parent/child estrangement under the broader brushstrokes of universal questions concerning the morality of both munitions manufacturing and the function of wartime photography. And the narrative has two principal voices, Harry and Sophie, father and daughter. The swings of mood and temperament of each, Sophie’s particularly, exacerbate the sense of dislocation I felt through much of the book. I have to think that's by design knowing Swift.

 I read the novel in one sitting, though I did revisit some of the key sections just to get straight the various players and events. Sophie’s narrative is terse and caustic as she spools her story to a psychiatrist in New York (Holden, is that you?). Harry’s version of events is more measured in tone, perhaps numbed by the horrors of war he photographed over the years, including the death of his own father at the hands of IRA terrorists. I just wasn’t sure of Harry’s audience, and that troubled me. Both father and daughter are obtuse in their gradual unfolding, elliptical omissions or curtailments tended to obscure (understandably) the painful past. More dislocation.

  But as the waves of the narratives washed over me, informational tides coming in and going out (Waterland?), things started to coalesce. I still felt that the novel left a lot for the reader to do, rendering it more like poetry than prose in typical Postmodern fashion I suppose, but those universal themes suggested by the traumas suffered by the Beech family, those both self-inflicted and imposed, will resonate I am sure.