1Long ignored and left to struggle, Graham Swift finally became famous in 1983 with his third novel, Waterland, and his inclusion on the first Granta list of the best young British novelists. Today he is regarded as one of the most prominent contemporary authors, and has just finished his eighth novel, Tomorrow. When Linda Hutcheon published her Poetics of Postmodernism in 1988, she used Waterland as a touchstone to define a particular kind of postmodernism, that she dubbed “historiographic metafiction.” Other paradigms explored by Hutcheon included Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Shame.

2However Graham Swift’s latest novel, Tomorrow, has almost none of the characteristics that Hutcheon itemizes: no self-conscious and unauthoritative, doubtful narrator, hardly any historiography, and what little metafiction there is remains remarkably unobtrusive and discreet. It is true that Graham Swift has become weary (and wary) of the “postmodernist” label, and in Tomorrow what he puts forward is the story much more than its telling. The whole tale is told, in the course of one night, by one woman lying awake beside her sleeping husband, and mentally addressing her sixteen-year old twins, both fast asleep also: “You’re sixteen and the night’s not young, but here’s a bedtime story” (Swift 2007, 9). Far from the postmodernist anxieties linked to entropy, disintegration, and fragmentation, the story quietly celebrates the joys and stability of a happy, loving marriage within a privileged social class, as if exploring what, in traditional stories, used to be left out or rather summarily dismissed in the phrase “and they lived happily ever after.” How significant is this evolution, in Swift’s career, from a postmodernist stance to a more subdued, straightforward conception of the novel as story-telling? To what extent can we say that it does, or does not, affect the very nature of Graham Swift’s fictitious universe and the literary quality of his works?

3In an article entitled “The Return of Story,” published in 2004, Julian Evans welcomed what he saw as a healthy return to “stories,” that is to say novels which turn away from formalist pyrotechnics, and the exhibition of an author’s ego, to engage with the world and with plausible stories about people within society. Evans however falls into the common mistake of equating “stories” with a kind of neo-realism, opposed to metafiction and formal experimentation. He thus gives a new lease of life to a dichotomy that Christine Brooke-Rose (among others) had foregrounded in 1980, albeit in defence of the opposite camp, because she peremptorily dismissed “stories” in favour of metafiction and formalism in the novel, scoffing at the idea that the common taste for “stories” would keep the novel alive:

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One absurd fallacy should perhaps be got out of the way: the ‘death of the novel’ has been announced for half a century or more, and journalistic critics always mock this and point out that thousands of novels go on getting published and read, because people will always want “stories.”

5Stories, she argued, could now find a natural new channel in films and television, and they would not die out even if the novel did. But it is most misleading to reduce the appetite for stories to a taste for a realistic, plausible, and reasonable reflection of society, and metafiction to a sterile, self-indulgent house of words without any links with reality. Christine Brooke-Rose defended the latter kind of experimentation, approvingly quoting the definition of metafiction given by Mas’ud Zavarzadeh:

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Metafiction. .. exults over its own fictitiousness, and its main counter-techniques are flat characterization, contrived plots, antilinear sequences of events, all fore-grounded as part of an extravagant overtotalization, a parody of interpretation which shows up the multiplicity of the real and the naïveté of trying to reach a total synthesis of life within the narrative.

7Yet all stories are not naively mimetic, and can be fantastic, surrealistic, allegorical, magic-realist, symbolical, etc. while maintaining a close, mirroring relationship with metafiction in the form of commentary upon a specific fiction.

Fiction and metafiction in Graham Swift’s novels

8Graham Swift (1988, 20) once expatiated on the reserve and inhibitions of English people and English novelists, noting that during the permissive sixties “the English novel went through a peculiarly dull, conservative phase, whereas in the ’80s, while England ha[d] suffered a climate of increasing political reaction, it seem[ed] to have lost its shyness.” In Waterland, he said, he had been trying to capture in his writing some of the “bravura” and “exhibitionism” of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children or Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot, even if, paradoxically, his theme was phlegm, as a metaphor for the “traditional detachment, introversion and impassiveness of the English.” What is indeed remarkable in Waterland is the way in which the themes and the fictional universe depicted in the diegesis and the metafictional, self-conscious commentaries within the text constantly reflect one another, serve as metaphors and mirror images for one another. The characters drain mud out of the water just as they metaphorically drain secrets and details out of the past, out of oblivion. The flat Fens become the “empty stage” on which the author can plot “something ambitious, adventurous and energetic” (1988, 20). Narrative and commentary, fiction and metafiction, become inseparable. Vehicle and tenor become reversible, and in many sentences the pronoun “it” could apply to the river Oose, or to history, just as well as to the narrative form: “It goes in two directions at once. It goes backwards and it goes forwards. It loops. It takes detours” (1984, 117). “How it repeats itself, how it goes back on itself.. .. How it twists, turns. How it goes in circles and brings us back to the same place” (123).

9In Shuttlecock, as in Ever After, the existence of a text within the text created endless opportunities for other self-reflexive effects of mirroring, symmetry and echoes. In Ever After the theatre is the daily universe of Bill Unwin’s beloved actress wife, but as it is also the realm of illusion, “the epitome of the false,” it becomes a unifying metaphor, appearing as theme, intertext, and generic model, since the story-telling is often dramatised, and some dialogues are treated as actual theatrical scenes (1992, 186). Likewise, palaeontology, which plays a dramatic role in the life of Matthew Pearce, turns into a metaphor for the role assigned to the reader of this intricate, anti-linear and fragmented narrative that seems made of broken and scattered bones: “You have to picture the scene. You have to reconstruct the moment, as patient palaeontologists reconstruct the anatomies of extinct beasts” (185). Catherine Bernard singled out this sort of novel when, in 1997, she drew the contours, within the field of the British contemporary novel, of a “realistic metafiction”: “un entre-deux,” “une zone de frayage liminale entre expérimentation et mimésis” (Bernard 145).

The complex relationship between postmodernism and modernism

10With Last Orders Graham Swift gave up this game of mirrors between self-conscious narration and narrative to turn to an absence of narration: the controlling, anxious narrator who tries to drain meaning out of the past and transmit a story to one or several narratees was replaced by a system of alternating, self-addressed inner monologues. Not narration therefore, but a fictitious flow of thoughts sometimes close to the modernist “stream of consciousness.” Graham Swift was accused of having plagiarised William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, one of the monuments of American modernism (McCabe 20). The assertion was as ridiculous and irrelevant as accusing James Joyce of plagiarising Homer in his Ulysses would have been. However, concerning filiations, it is true that in Last Orders it is easier to see the modernist connexion than the postmodernist or “historiographic metafictional” one. Linda Hutcheon argued anyway that there is no clean break between the two; that the “post” in postmodernism does not simply mean “after,” and that “modernism literally and physically haunts postmodernism, and their interrelations should not be ignored” (Hutcheon 49).

11In Out of this World those interrelations are definitely present: as in a few of Faulkner’s novels, each chapter bears as a title the name of the thinking, reminiscing character, but the discourse thus produced is not meant solely as a monologue: often it has a potential narratee, and therefore loses the transparency and intimacy of the “inner monologue” to become a constructed discourse, a kind of role-playing, and a leaning towards a possible reconciliation. Thus Harry’s monologues tend to become a mute plea of reconciliation, the rehearsal perhaps of a letter that he might bring himself to write to his estranged daughter Sophie, and Sophie’s soliloquies are partly inner monologues, partly sentences addressed to her psychoanalyst, partly rehearsed letters to her estranged father, and partly the prototypes of the tales she will later tell her two twins. One can often spot in Graham Swift’s earlier novels the seeds of later stories and characters, and in Sophie’s silent and tender appeals to her twin boys one can read the beginning of an idea, of a voice, a tone, that were to blossom almost twenty years later in Tomorrow:

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I was like a black cloak around you; you were like a little warm light. And that was the first time I felt that you actually existed, that this wasn’t just some condition of mine: “being pregnant.” (Except that I was ignorant too, wasn’t I? because I never imagined—twins!).

13However Out of this World is much less of a straightforward “story” than is Tomorrow; in the earlier novel there are all sorts of postmodernist interrogations. Historiography intervenes again, when Swift confronts the rewriting of history from another angle (showing the ordinariness of the monsters at the Nuremberg trial, showing that “the worst things are perpetrated by people no one would pick out from a crowd,” [1997, 102]). The links between art and the representation of reality are addressed through the theme of photography. Harry Beech shows how framing and selection can transform the agony and horror of war into heroism and propaganda, into “pure Greek statue, pure Hollywood, pure charisma” (119): “the separation of the image from the thing. The extraction of the world from the world” (119), the last phrase being one of the innumerable self-conscious variations and meditations on the title of the novel, which acquires endless metamorphic ramifications. Tomorrow is written in a different key altogether, single-voiced, intimate, restricted, enclosed within a womb-like cosy bubble, and if it points towards larger themes, such as medical science or snail biology, it is only very briefly. (Snails, unlike eels in Waterland, are only given a superficial treatment). In Out of this World voices can be a little overstrained, Sophie’s often too blunt and coarse, Harry’s often too “written,” too literary, for example in its use of hypallage (“the voluptuous procession that is shortly to enter through the amazed hotel portals” 47).

14In Last Orders voices are much more finely attuned: Graham Swift is famous for having created a demotic form of English that succeeds in sounding both authentically cockney and wonderfully poetic, his own specific answer to Faulkner’s use of southern dialect in As I Lay Dying. Although some critics, like Nicholas Tredell, have accused Swift of writing in an unauthentic, condescending idiom that does not allow the characters to express any “challenging” or “uncomfortable” things (Cooper 62), others have praised his capacity to invent an imaginative rendering of an idiom rather than a mimetic reproduction of the way Bermondsey butchers and greengrocers might express themselves (Gallix 45). Working from cockney characteristics like rhyming slang and a strong taste for alliteration, most apparent in the speech of the least sophisticated character, Lenny, who says things like “Wavy Navy. Frigging frigates” (Swift 1996, 121), Graham Swift adds prosody, polysyndeton, hypallage, assonance, and mixes popular diction and more elevated phrases, to enrich and widen what might otherwise have sounded rather trite and repetitive, while maintaining all along the illusion that the voices do belong to working-class people. Thus Ray describes Lenny getting out at Margate to “breathe in the briny,” an alliterative phrase that sounds perfectly authentic, but the previous description, “Lenny edges out of his seat, all abashed and obedient” is much more literary and sophisticated in style. The consonance in b, however, answering the alliteration present in “breathe in the briny,” creates an illusion of harmony uniting the linguistic levels (1996, 263). In the following description the voice is still Ray’s; it begins very classically but ends in Swift’s invented hybrid idiom, managing to transform a sinuous, languid landscape into an impression of comical, stiff, almost military order: “The road twists along between the hills, with orchards climbing up the slopes on one side, all bare and brown and trimmed and lined up like the bristles on a brush” (192). The effect is due to the imagery, to polysyndeton, and to an alliteration in b and br. Hypnotic repetition and hammering alliteration all contribute to the effect, as in Vic’s humorous praise of the punctuality that funeral directors must observe: “you shouldn’t be late for the dead, just because they’re dead. One of my rules. Don’t dilly-dally with the deceased” (217) or in Mandy’s fascinated portrayal of butchers at breakfast, “all chomping and guzzling and big and blood-smeared and butchery” (163), which also introduces a colourful neologism, “butchery.”

15We can conclude therefore that in Last Orders creativity with language is omnipresent, but there is no self-conscious narrative voice to point this out in explicit metafictional devices. As for the problematization of historiography, it does not interfere as such in Last Orders, as it does most prominently in Waterland, but the sense of history and of the past, as in Faulkner’s novels, is omnipresent however, especially in the characters’ memories of World War II and the depiction of the evolution of the Bermondsey shops and businesses from one decade to the next. Conversely, in The Sweet Shop Owner, in which the same theme of the evolution of a high street and its businesses had been treated, there was a constant and explicit questioning of the processes of historiography. The narrative voice insists on the non-glamorous, petty accounts that historiography has to rely on, such as the amount of equipment issued to British soldiers in one area or the amount of ration books distributed in a given period: “12,840 helmets, 25,700 packs. When [Irene] wrote now from London she added at the foot of her letters numbers of her own. 4,000, 5,000 ration books. Was it the same code? ’43, ’44. History was drawing up its inventory” (1983, 79). The economic evolution of English society also transpires, through the use of a telling synecdoche, as the reader is regularly informed of how much profit, as years go by, the sweet shop owner makes in the course of one day: four pounds a day in 1938 (46), “fourteen, fifteen pounds a day” in the fifties (132), and the figures steadily rise (142, 148) until they reach the sum of ninety two pounds cashed on the first of June 1974, the day of the framing story, of Dorry’s birthday and Willy’s carefully planned suicide. Graham Swift deliberately opposes this mundane book-keeping to the illusions and deformations that create glorious myths, “history enshrined in make-believe”: the Technicolor “programmes at the Odeon” showing “cheerful re-enactments of the war,” the “lurid stories in the boys’ comics” of “grim-jawed fighter-pilots and ogreish Germans,” the collectable packs of cards illustrating “‘Great Battles of World War Two’” (131). Steering clear from such flamboyance, the focaliser, Willy Chapman, guides the reader’s gaze to small but significant changes in the daily life of the High Street in the sixties, compared to some giant aquarium: “The Saturday crowds in the High Street grew bigger and bigger. They bobbed like figures carried in water past the cluttered port-hole of the shop window. Eighteen, nineteen pounds a day” (142). He observes with wonder the appearance of a new phenomenon, teenage culture, comparing these brash youngsters, with their “little looks, as they walked, of arrogance and temerity” to the lad he used to be: “And was there once a William Chapman, aged eighteen or nineteen, who’d taken the tram every morning to work, dressed in a grey waistcoat and a stiff collar, as if he were already old?” (142).

16Graham Swift likes to construct stories that cover a single day (The Sweet Shop Owner, The Light of Day, Last Orders), or a single night (Tomorrow) but in which the past keeps intruding into the present. Thus he follows the example of prestigious modernist precursors, or at least of some of them, because in Last Orders the idiom is much closer to the gruff, coarse vernacular of Leopold Bloom in Joyce’s Ulysses than to the refined and genteel thoughts of Virginia Woolf’s eponymous Mrs Dalloway. Therefore one could conclude that although postmodernism and modernism do entertain close links with each other, Swift’s novels can be divided along a fault line separating historiographic metafictions from non metafictional narratives.

Metafiction: celebrating the love of words

17In Last Orders the experiment with language takes place above the characters’ heads, as it were; they remain perfectly unselfconscious, unaware of being under the voyeuristic scrutiny of their creator and their readers, unlike characters in a self-conscious postmodernist universe, who are very likely to cross boundaries and break the frame, as in Paul Auster’s Travels in the Scriptorium, in which an old man who seems to be suffering from a version of Alzheimer’s disease finds himself mysteriously and vaguely threatened by the characters that he once created, and who turn out to be identical to many characters in other novels by Paul Auster. [1] If in Last Orders Graham Swift seems to have scrupulously avoided metafiction, it makes a discreet and diffident reappearance in The Light of Day, because the narrator and protagonist, George Webb, is slowly learning to write and to value words and language. In fact here the metatextual commentary is not really metafictional, because instead of deconstructing the fiction itself it harps on words and language in general. Indeed, when George Webb uses his imagination to construct totally arbitrary and imaginary scenes occurring between the couple he is following, and that he could not have witnessed, it adds to the depth of the fictitious illusion much more than it points out the constructed nature of the fiction. It encourages readers to suspend their disbelief a little more willingly, as when George Webb, laying flowers, two years later, on Bob’s grave in Putney cemetery, wonders “where did they do it—Kristina and Bob?” (59) and imagines them, “picture[s] the scene” (60) of the pair of them “fuck[ing] against a tree like people who own nothing” (59). He effortlessly enters their minds, like some omniscient and authoritative author: “And she’s already aware how this may be a memory soon. An English wood” (60). But even in the midst of this fiction within the fiction the narrator betrays that his first interest is language itself, because the commentary and the celebration concern words themselves, the building bricks of language:

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An English wood. Bracken and brambles and silver birch.. .. she’s still a student of English words—and he’s her teacher now. She scuffs at something at her feet and stoops and looks. The hair parts from her neck. She knows the word “mushroom” but she’s forgotten, if she ever learnt it, the other word. “Toadstool.”. .. “Toadstool.” The mystery of words. Toadstool. Foxglove. .. (60). “Toadstool,” he says. A mad word. (108)

19George Webb, who used to be a policeman and to fill notebooks with terse, prosaic facts, is slowly beginning to savour the dense mystery and suggestiveness of language, to look at his own native speech as a foreigner learning it would do, with wonder and interest: “Dusk. Twilight. She taught me to look at words. The way I think she once taught Kristina. Strange English words. Their shape, their trace, their scent. Dusk. Why is it so strangely thrilling—winter dusk? (2003, 188). George is now filling new notebooks with words and sentences, trying to capture for the imprisoned Sarah the taste and flavour of free, unconstrained life, away from barred windows. He submits the notebooks to her once a fortnight, when he visits her, and she corrects his style and encourages his audacity. His style remains terse and telegraphic, but acquires a density and a concentration that becomes almost poetic, prompting Anthony Quinn, in a review of the novel, to assert that language has been “planed down to a switchlike leanness,” but that “there is a pressure of meaning behind the apparent reticence”: “this is gumshoe haiku,” as he humorously puts it. Words have acquired for George a physiognomy, a personality:

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Off duty now for good… And now it’s such a strange, sad, far-off word—“duty”. Now Sarah’s made me think about words. When once it used to be just something floating in the air. “Duty officer,” “duty roster,” “in the course of duty.. .”.

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“I should shrug and say it’s just an expression, it’s just a bunch of words. But I take words seriously these days.”

22George acknowledges that language is artificial and that a signifier cannot claim satisfactorily to represent a signified: “it’s just an expression of course, words aren’t things, things aren’t words” (226), and yet he strives to make metaphors come alive, by literalising tropes deadened by habit and usage. When his assistant, Rita, tells him that his passion for Sarah is vain, “just a cold trail,” he picks it up immediately with a meta-linguistic comment: “That’s the phrase she used. A cold trail.. .. A professional phrase, a detective’s phrase.. .. It’s just a phrase but I could see it like a thing. A long path, stony and bare” (232). Ready-made, banal phrases, used as such at the beginning of the book, take on another hue: “And some of them. .. come in as if for a full-blown audition.. .. (Rita, for example). Dressed to kill. Clouds of scent” (13). The phase finds an ironic and literal echo in the description of what Sarah was wearing on the night of the murder: “she was dressed – don’t say it – to kill” (161). Little by little, the boundaries between signifier and signified become blurred, as if words suddenly took on a life of their own, sometimes threatening and lethal:

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I’d never been this way before—where words, that were just bits of air, could turn scary and black and hard. The word “wrong,” for example. It gets chucked all the time at kids, gets chucked at you all the time at school. I’d never caught it, never felt the weight of the word “wrong.” We got to the tee. He drove first and I handed him his club. I felt the weight of the word “club” in my hand.

24It has become a tired leitmotiv of literary criticism that language is poor, inadequate, unsatisfactory, that it is a weak and limited tool, and critics and theoreticians tend to deplore its inability to represent reality, and yet in this novel Graham Swift is definitely expressing the reverse position, and celebrating the heady, concentrated power of words, their capacity to create the illusion of life literally out of thin air. In Family Matters, a novel published by Indian-Canadian writer Rohinton Mistry, Vilas is a public scrivener who warns his customers about the necessity of being sparing with words: “A letter is like perfume, you don’t apply a whole bottle. Just one dab will fill your senses. Words are the same. .. a few are sufficient” (Mistry 141).

Lines of light and darkness: an aesthetic exercise

25If Last Orders, because of its succession of inner monologues, recalls the aesthetics of modernist novels, both British and American, The Light of Day adopts a radically different model, that of the American private eye novels of the forties, and of the black and white Hollywood movies they were turned into. The cover chosen for the hardback edition was a black and white photograph, by Tim Platt, of a woman’s knees and legs: an apt illustration for the description of Sarah Nash as seen for the first time by George Webb:

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The sun came in at a low slant through my office window, just like it’s doing today. Cold outside, warm slabs of sun indoors. It fell like a partition across the desk between us. It just touched her knees, making them look as if they couldn’t hide.. .. She looked at me and smiled, for some reason. A smile as defenceless as her knees. You cross a line.

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A black skirt of some velvety material,. .. a white blouse. The bar of sunshine between us caught her knees and gave them an almost tinselly sheen. They didn’t seem like the usual knees of women that can project from a skirt with all kinds of angles and meanings. They were just knees caught in the light.

28Throughout the novel the motifs of light and darkness, of contrasts in black and white, of lines and their transgression (in the etymological sense of “stepping across a line”), occur again and again. In his office, in the first scene, Rita “steps through bars of bright light” (4). Opposite George’s office, across the street, in a florist’s shop, “the sun comes in from behind, through a back window, so the girl who’s serving becomes for a moment a silhouette against a sheet of light” (9). As he visits Bob’s grave, George comments: “I step nearer, slowly—as if there’s some line, some edge.. .. the sun’s shining down on me and I’m black with hate” (55). References to reflected light recur steadily, almost transforming the novel into an exercise, a “study,” in the musical sense: “The road drops away in front of me.. .. The sun is almost straight ahead, so everything in front has a glint, a metal sheen, like some great glistening slide” (52).

29As in “You cross a line” (9), the metaphor used by George to describe his abrupt fall into a helpless passion, the imagery of transgression pervades the novel, from the opening lines (“Something happens. We cross a line,” 3), to the image of “pass[ing] way beyond the bounds” (52), to George’s memories of his wife in her youth (“I still see her when she was seventeen and I never even knew her, taking that first brave step. As if she’s up on some high wire, about to put her foot forward,” 90), to a verbatim repetition, “You cross a line” (180). All these notations build up to the splendid final page in which George once again fondly muses on Sarah’s future liberation from prison, trying to imagine the weather and atmosphere of that long hoped-for day, between fog and crisp, cold sunshine:

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Fog. Everything hidden and lost.. .. To slip back into the world when it’s only half there.. .. Like prisoners who step the other way under a blanket, as if they’re naked, through the last stab of light.. .. But tomorrow will be like today, brilliant, blue and still. I want it to be like today. .. when she comes back, steps out at last into the clear light of day.

31In this forties-like setting of various shades of brightness and darkness, of white and grey, the themes and characters also belong to the genre of the detective novel, but this has to be qualified, because The Light of Day recalls Raymond Chandler’s novels, with their mixture of wry humour and seedy, melancholic atmospheres, much more than Dashiell Hammett’s hard-boiled fictions, in which the private eyes are brutal, cynical, and more often than not corrupt. Chandler’s hero, Philip Marlowe, is soft-hearted behind a put-on hard-boiled façade; he’s a chivalrous, rather chaste creature, very different from his incarnation by Humphrey Bogart in Hawk’s filmed version of The Big Sleep. Chandler’s text suggests that Marlowe is an anachronism, a knight who has wandered out of a courtly universe, a knight fallen from his chessboard: “I looked down at the chessboard. The move with the knight was wrong. .. Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn’t a game for knights” (Chandler 153). Interestingly, this subtle and complex portrayal of a male hero recalls Graham Swift’s gentle anti-heroes, who are light-years away from hefty masculine types, and who are ready to lay down their lives for the lady they cherish, like George Webb, or Bill Unwin, or Willy Chapman, who is chosen by Irene precisely because, unlike the aptly named Hancock, all hands and cock, who has raped her, he represents no sexual threat of violent masculinity. On their first outing together, very significantly, Willy’s offer of a sandwich is made “in a gesture at once bluff and chivalrous, like a knight laying down arms” (Swift 1983, 26).

A bedtime story

32Willy Chapman, all his life, behaves in an innocuous, unthreatening fashion, like “a pet dog to be led on a lead” (26) or “a cat in her lap” (32), but before his wife died he never succeeded in gaining her love, although he kept dreaming of seeing her “restored to him: the bargain broken” (127). For Irene, the unspoken, implicit bargain is sealed when she gives birth to their daughter (“And she had given him, in her place, Dorothy” 127). Most marriages in Graham Swift’s novels are similarly tragic or problematic, except in Tomorrow in which both partners share the same love, the same sexual ardour, and the same happiness. Even if the “morrow” of the title, and of the epigraph, [2] looms large, and the reader soon discovers that it is the day the parents have chosen to disclose a family secret to the twins, thus perhaps jeopardising the atmosphere of familial bliss, the shadow never seems overwhelming or really seriously threatening.

33The whole narration of this “bedtime story” is entrusted to a feminine voice, which is a first occurrence in Swift’s work. There are no historiographic digressions, there is hardly any metafiction, except when Paula narrates the episode of Mike’s first meeting with her father. The first lines of chapter ten show the couple waiting outside “the front door of number seven Napier Street, Kensington, waiting for [her] father to open it” (2007, 60). But very soon the narrator, asking her sleeping twins to “pity [their] poor father, … standing outside [her] father’s door” (61), plunges into various digressions concerning the grandfathers. So that the reader has to wait six pages before the narrative returns to the episode at hand:

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But come back—all these houses!—to Napier Street, Kensington. Come back to when my father was a mere sixty-six and your dad, who was twenty-one, was quaking on that white-pillared porch. Poor man, he’s been there quite a while.
And now my father is opening that black door. ..

35Here we witness a humorous breaking of the frame, a metafictional blurring between diegesis and narration, between story and fable, underlined by the shift to the present tense. It is quite uncharacteristic of the novel as a whole, in which we are wrapped up within the fictitious illusion, but we can read it as a fugitive homage to the universe of Tristram Shandy, who leaves his mother eavesdropping outside the door of the parlour, “determined to let her stand for five minutes” (Sterne V, 5, 353), before upbraiding himself for forgetting her there, a few chapters later (V, 11, 361). This way of winking at Sterne’s notoriously “pre-postmodernist” masterpiece (which, like Tomorrow, is much concerned with the mechanics of conception) only serves to emphasise the fact that metafiction is conspicuously absent everywhere else in Tomorrow. And yet, even if it is anything but a historiographic metafiction, or a modernist series of inner monologues, Tomorrow is subtly but unmistakeably Swiftian. Like all his novels, it presents a characteristic avoidance of chronological linearity, so that the narrative is turned into a puzzle, and the themes and motifs sound remarkably familiar: family secrets, fathers and sons, fathers and daughters, the tension between the drabness of leafy suburbia and the bright, shimmering appeal of the seaside that so frequently intrudes into the urban scenes. .. Recurrently, the narrative evokes the golden sand dunes of Craiginish, in Scotland, a love nest for the couple: the detail elaborates on the final scene of Shuttlecock, in which, at Camber Sands, within a “shifting and rippling Sahara,” “the landscape of the desert, bleached and smooth-contoured,” “naked [like] human flesh,” Prentice and Marian finally set their marriage on a better footing (1982, 220). In Tomorrow, Swift’s obsession with the idea of “marooned” characters [3] gives way to a celebration of the strength of human optimism and resilience, but also to a poignant paean to happiness and its vulnerability, the possibility that it “will somehow come apart, get dashed to bits, like a Cornish shipwreck” (2007, 194).

36Although Graham Swift has managed to carve for himself a very specific niche within the landscape of the contemporary British novel, a specifically English niche (prompting a few acid critics to condemn his alleged nostalgia and parochialism), and although he definitely has a recognisable voice and style, one cannot say that he has remained faithful to the dazzling “entre-deux” technique, the wheels-within-wheels, the regression ad infinitum of the mutually reflecting mirrors of fiction and metafiction developed in Waterland. Some readers may regret the fact, and miss the complexity, variety and layered texture of the previous novels, and yet all Swift’s books, in various ways, come up to very exacting literary standards. Last Orders constitutes an original and remarkable achievement, and Tomorrow, which might be considered by some as a more readerly than writerly work, is nevertheless a superb novel in its own right, filled with tender, intimate humour and a rich palette of subtle nuances. Graham Swift is a safe bet for literary posterity. We might even use, to nickname him, the name of the horse that Ray selects for his dying friend Jack in Last Orders (2003, 232): “Miracle Worker.”