Graham Swift (Graham Swift – Literature) is a Booker Prize winning novelist. It was his novel ‘Last Orders’ that took the 1996 prize whilst also becoming the joint winner of the 1996 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. His novel Waterland (1983) won the Guardian Fiction Prize. Both of these have been adapted for the screen, ‘Last Orders’ in 2001 (Last Orders (2001) – IMDb), and ‘Waterland’ in 1992 (Waterland (1992) – IMDb)
In Swift’s novel Ever After (1992), Bill Unwin, an undistinguished academic, has never recovered from the death of his famous actress wife. He convalesces from his own brush with death in an Oxford college garden. There are two parallel stories. One, spanning post-war Paris, 1950s Soho and contemporary sexual and scholarly entanglements, surveys the muddle of his own life. The other, drawn from the notebooks of a Victorian ancestor, tells of Matthew Pearce, a serious-minded man whose happiness is destroyed by his compulsive search for truth.
Pearce had been a geologist and surveyor who had worked alongside Isambard Kingdom Brunel building the great Saltash Bridge in 1855. The bridge was superb success but financially ruinous, leading to Brunel’s early death. Around the same time Pearce had come across the fossil of an ‘ichtyosaurus’ in the West Country cliffs. The vision of this predatory creature converts Pearce to a theory of evolution before Darwin. He sets off to the New World but is drowned during the voyage.
Of this own family story, we finally get to learn about the death of Bill’s father. He had not committed suicide on account of love or his wife’s betrayal. It was due to moral guilt at involvement in shady dealings between Britain and America around weapons of mass destruction.
Bill’s recollections of his beautiful wife Ruth, his wayward mother and his philandering stepfather, his wry reflections on his present plight and his fascination with the forgotten Matthew combine to form a powerful depiction of mental anguish. There are further twists and turns which lead Bill to his own attempted suicide.
Embracing two centuries and a host of subjects, from ballet dancers and prehistoric beasts to the experience of love, this book raises the persistent question: ‘Does anything really matter as time churns on?’
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368 Pages in Scribner UK paperback
First published 1992
ISBN-13 : 978-1471187407
