Product Description

The dazzling new novel by the author of Waterland approaches the riddle of life from the agonized perspective of Bill Unwin, a middle-aged orphan, premature widower, and failed suicide suddenly obsessed by the diaries of his Victorian ancestor, a man whose fall from happiness eerily parallels his own. "He writes like a Henry James reborn after the sexual revolution."--New York Times Book Review.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #958037 in Books
• Published on: 1993-03-02
• Released on: 1993-03-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Musing on a set of Victorian diaries and reminiscing about his own life, the quirky academic who narrates Swift's latest novel fails to capture the reader's imagination. A BOMC alternate selection in cloth.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
While struggling to reconstruct his life after an unsuccessful suicide attempt, middle-aged narrator Bill Unwin confronts his inescapable past. Numbed by the deaths of his wife and his mother, Bill had become a reluctant and skeptical academic researching notebooks written by a Victorian ancestor named Matthew Pearce. These notebooks provide a narrative vehicle for traveling backward and forward in time, giving Bill abundant opportunity to expound on such diverse topics as academia, dinosaurs, Darwin, railroads, death, and, ultimately, the enduring and life-sustaining power of love. Swift, the talented author of Waterland (Pocket Bks., 1984) and Out of This World (Poseidon Pr., 1988), has created a marvelous character whose wry humor and perspicacity uncover the elusive relationship between history and fiction. Poignant, astute, heartwarming, and welcome. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 11/15/91.
- Jacqueline Adams, Carroll Cty. P.L., Westminster, Md.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
This time out, Swift (Out of This World, Waterland, Learning to Swim, etc.) at first seems to be reworking a fictional convention that's becoming tired from overuse: the writer--or, as here, the Oxford academic--who finds himself in possession of an old manuscript whose revelations dovetail with the perturbations of the modern interpreter. Bill Unwin is the ambivalent don in question, and the journals (bequeathed by family) concern a Victorian ancestor named Matthew Pearce, a surveyor and rector's son-in-law whose life and faith is changed forever when, on the cliffs of Dorset in 1844, he comes face-to-face with an ichthyosaurus. Darwin replaces God in Pearce at that instant--but in Unwin the revelation only sharpens the dilemma of knowing what's better unknown (in his own case, the suicide death of his father), and the questions of immortality and memory and fame and mutability (all very much on his mind since his beloved actress wife Ruth's early cancer death). Unwin has attempted suicide himself but failed, and the vagrant nature of his narration seems an impossible search for focus. Swift is a very cunning writer, though. Every thematic strand- -books, bridges, railroads, dinosaurs, acting, sex--subtly achieves a color that makes it recognizable once the chords of fugue on the theme of mortality and immortality are struck. And feeling (a rare commodity in younger British writers nowadays) is what makes these colors so high: even at its most looping and shuffling, the book finds ways to move you, untricked-up emotion being its surest ground. Unwin's losses are ranged around, but so are the bravery of his questioning memory and the fidelity of his love. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

... and Even Beyond
What a poignant and eloquent account of life (or at least the illusion of being alive) by an obviously seasoned and sensitive artist! Swift describes the sublimely vivid yet hazy realizations about a bookish yet intuitive academic's quest for the pure meaning in his life. Delicious portraits of life in Paris, recollections of finding and losing true love and friendship, and a yearning to prove or disprove the validity of doctrinized religion are blended amidst the collage of dabbles with sexuality, betrayal, perceptions of human nature, and the tragic Hamlet condition of jealousy pangs for a mother who, upon close character inspection, has even further muddled the once secure ideals regarding family and lineage. There is hardly any well-defined escape out of this complicated entangling, but the seemingly nonexistent resolution may actually shed an enlightening view upon the meaning of existence... if you read closely enough between the lines. Savor this one and enjoy.

An allegory with a twist
Graham Swift is the last great story teller-- a combination of Ernest Hemingway and Aesop. By juxtaposing the first person narrative of a disenchanted college proffessor (sp?) and the diaries of an early believer in the evolutionary theaory of nature (Darwin), Swift spins a tale of morality without a moral, and draws paralells between the two protagonists and their respective searches for the answer to one untimelly question- does anythnig really matter? Swift's vivid yet spare prose mirrors the paradoxical nature of both his main characters. Each is at once vulnerable and cynical, courageous but exhausted, afraid to be alone, and afraid of intimacy. Swift could have ended by providing a clearly defined answer to his own characters question thus weakening the realistic tone he had set throughout. However, he refuses to tie such a neat bow. Swift merelly aknowledges that asking the question "is anything divine?" is more important than finding a concrete answer. Swift supposes finally that life is a journey made of questions and we can either rejoice in the precarious nature of such a subjective path, or allow it to cause us to despair. On the way from page one to the last paragraph, the reader is made to sift through interesting musings concerning Shakespeare, Darwinism, Paris, male/female relationships, suicide, and academic politics. Graham Swift is possibly the finest modern English writer, and this is quite possibly his finest novel to date.