Mark's Space: Fiction as History

One writer I've found that carefully crafts his work, meticulously choosing each word to capture the three dimensional nature of his characters is Graham Swift. I first discovered his work or more specifically his novel 'Waterland' when I was at university in the nineties and what a revelation. He seems to evoke the whole history of the Fenlands in England's East Anglia through the thoughts of his characters particularly the central protagonist of the secondary school history teacher.The novel is one of those books that still resonates long after being read. It also inspired me to read more of his work such as 'Last Orders' which won the Booker literary prize. This is perhaps a modern updating of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales as it narrates the journeys both physical and psychological of four friends who drive from London to Canterbury to pay their last respects to a late friend.

The extract below I found in 'The Independent' newspaper

"We still know little for sure about the prospects for intelligent fiction in a digital age. Yet most observers agree that the status of the professional "career novelist", one devoted to an exacting craft that builds over many books into a shelf that makes sense, may shift from that of a rare species to a deeply endangered one. Read Graham Swift – this quietly commanding new novel, and the eight that preceded it before and after the big splash of his third book Waterland in 1983 – and feel the weight of what we stand to lose. Single-minded, gimmick-proof, Swift's fiction has paid unswerving attention, in both the fine detail of his prose and the wide architecture of his forms, to what the critic Raymond Williams called "structures of feeling". These novels have grown organically into a social-emotional record of modern English experience sensed on the pulse, on the tongue – in the heart. Future historians should trust them above headlines"

(Boyd Tomkin The Independent)