OUT OF THIS WORLD

by Graham Swift ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1988

Like this English author's Waterland (1984), a compendium of dark personal histories and darker meditations about the ways of the world. Here, in contrapuntal monologues, a father and daughter straggle in a morass of suspicion, hatred, horrific incident, and indissoluble love, to find one another again--through the living and the dead. Along the way, there are speculations on the nature of and need for contemporary myth and illusion, echoing the search for a clearer vision of closest relationships. At 64, prize-winning photographer Harry, who has abruptly given up his profession, has found passion and love with 23-year-old Jenny. Yet Harry is mulling over (and over) the life and death of his father, Robert Beech, a hero of two wars and owner of a munitions firm, who was killed by a terrorist bomb at his own English estate. Harry's first monologue concerns the last time he felt close to his father, a lifelong adversary. They watched men land on the moon, and Harry considered the TV camera as a device no longer simply recording, but one that ""conferred reality. . . the world always wants another world, a shadow, an echo, a model of itself."" Harry revolves and evolves the image of the father, who had disowned him--or had he been the disowner?--while Harry's daughter Sophie addresses her thoughts to a psychiatrist in Brooklyn, New York. Sophie, pet of Granddad Robert, saw him killed, saw Harry's camera trained on the murder site from an upstairs window. And what of her mother, the late Anna, and did Harry really save Sophie from drowning because of Anna's neglect? Although the sere drear of the intense meditations is somewhat enervating, there is much that is bright and haunting. Swift is a writer of considerable skill and force.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1988

ISBN: 0679740325

Page Count: -

Publisher: Poseidon/Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1988

Categories: FICTION