Book Review : A Reflection Stretched to Novel Form

Out of This World by Graham Swift (Poseidon Press: $16.95; 208 pages)

After Shakespeare or thereabouts, the English discovered a powerful motive force that would launch them upon the world. It was the force of repulsion; the kind of thing you see when magnetized iron filings confront each other with their positive poles and scoot away in disgust. (If physics can speak of “charm” it must be allowed “disgust.”)

What the English cannot bear has made powerful history, good and bad. They couldn’t bear King Charles’ pretensions, and after a while they couldn’t bear Cromwell’s disruptive stubbornness. They couldn’t bear their neighbors’ sheep; hence--a certain amount of stretching goes with this “hence” and those to follow--the enclosure system and the modern capitalist economy.

They couldn’t bear growing up; hence, the golden myth of English childhood. They couldn’t bear actually seeing their children--children and childhood are two very different things--hence, boarding schools, the playing fields of Eton, and the Empire. They couldn’t bear, as Shaw noted, each other; hence, once more, the Empire.

The comic and astringent force of English writers and dramatists since World War II derives very largely from a clear-eyed, an exalted and inspired vision of all the things there are around them that they cannot bear. Evelyn Waugh, Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, Simon Gray, Christopher Hampton, David Hare, Peter Nichols and on and on.

The downside, or perhaps the final exhaustion of this dynamic irritability, is the large gesture reduced to mere waspishness. In Graham Swift’s “Out of This World,” a large and arresting thought about one of the evils of contemporary life is illustrated by a fiction that is more waspish than disconcerting.

Cramped Story

It is a cramped story set on a large stage. Its two principal voices are those of a son alienated from his father, and of the son’s daughter, alienated from him.

Harry Beech, the son, is a famous war photographer who has given up his trade to retire to a country cottage. As a young man, he had been disowned by his father, founder of an arms-manufacturing conglomerate, for refusing to go into the family business.

Harry could not stomach the notion of manufacturing death; instead, he chose the aseptic, possibly useful task of recording the world’s disasters. The book’s theme is that this is a false choice; that our spectator society, fed by television, photography and journalism, is an accomplice in the evil it watches. There is no morally neutral witness.

Harry’s wandering life as a celebrity journalist has left a casualty. His daughter, Sophie, motherless after Harry’s Greek wife was killed in a plane crash, was brought up by her grandfather. Merchants of death can be loving grandfathers, just as dedicated professionals can be derelict fathers, Swift tells us.

A Bomb Explodes

And one day, when Harry, now reconciled, is visiting his father at his country house; and Sophie, married and hoping for a meaningful contact with Harry, is also there, a terrorist bomb goes off in the driveway, tearing the old man to pieces.

In a daze, Sophie wanders out onto the terrace. A movement above catches her eye. It is Harry, poking his camera out at the incinerated flesh and metal below. It is a reflex action, as quick and as lethal as the bomb’s detonator.

It sends Sophie, in mortal and moral shock, back to her home and husband in New York, and a future of bleak promiscuity and sterile sessions with a psychoanalyst. It makes Harry realize what all his glamorous world-witnessing leads to. He retires to a cottage, marries a spontaneous young woman, and does aerial photographs of the archeological remains of past civilizations.

Swift manipulates his story so that its ironies turn up punctually, and its reflective message is unmistakable. The story, unfortunately, is a shoddy, cliche-ridden vehicle for them.

Harry represents moral emptiness at first; and, later, moral awakening. But a fictional character must not only represent; it must be. And as a character, Harry is as empty and vapid when he is right as when he is wrong. His narration is self-centered and charmless; he is a dimly seen bore throughout.

Sophie is worse. Swift has chosen that much-abused narrative device, the psychoanalytic monologue. Sophie’s voice--acid, aggressive, self-indulgent--is that of an unpleasant child lecturing her doll because nobody else will play with her. Dr. K., the analyst, is suitably doll-like.

“Out of This World” is a reflection stretched into novel form. We have met all these superior, alienated people before, dozens of times. We have heard the dying fall of their voices.

It is when Swift’s own voice comes out, now and then, meditating through Harry on the responsibilities of art, craft and life, that his book relinquishes the wasp-buzzing of its characters, and sets off the sudden flash of a wasp’s sting.