Book festivals are full of pitfalls as well as pleasures.
One that is particularly hard to negotiate is the question of how not to sound sycophantic when chairing an event with an author you have always greatly admired. Superlatives and hype are the loose change of the literary world, unexceptional books regularly proclaimed as brilliant, or thrilling, or unputdownable. Never is this more apparent than at book festivals such as Edinburgh, when hundreds of authors are competing for air. Interviewers often fall back on shameless hyperbole, either to steady their own nerves, or those of the author or, indeed, the audience, who wouldn't like to think they'd paid to see someone who might never lift a prize, let alone scratch out a first-class sentence.
Last week I was asked to introduce Graham Swift, who is one of the world's finest living writers. If prizes were lightbulbs, he would be brighter than Blackpool's promenade; his accolades over the years include the Booker, James Tait Black, Geoffrey Hill Memorial, Winifred Holtby Memorial and Guardian Fiction prizes, the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger and the Premio Grinzane Cavour. It was Last Orders, his account of a group of elderly men scattering their friend Jack's ashes, that won him the Booker in 1996, but if you're like me, you may have thought he had already won it for Waterland, in 1983. Sadly, he was pipped to that post by JM Coetzee.
Like many good writers, Swift is a modest man, and when talking to him one treads a fine line between expressing admiration and gushing. Too much enthusiasm, you suspect, would embarrass him. Rather than risk that, I will instead rail here against the fact that one of his finest novels, Wish You Were Here, was cruelly absent from any prize list when it was published in 2011. The story of a farmer who has sold the family land and become a caravan park owner, it opens with him on his way to the repatriation of his soldier brother's body, after his death in Iraq. An extraordinarily powerful, tender book, its atmosphere hangs over me yet. I doubt there was a better novel published that year, or many others, and the fact that it was overlooked - ignored, almost - is baffling. Yet with typical sangfroid, Swift moved on.
As you might guess from the title of his new collection England And Other Stories, Swift's homeland is his fictional domain. In fact, I doubt you could find a more English writer, his country the bedrock of most, possibly all, of his work. Tim Binding, who was a junior editor at Penguin when Swift sent him the first pages of Waterland, immediately realised it was a remarkable book: "It has taken on that thing almost no English novelist dared to do for post-war year after post-war year. Speak of us, to us, for us." He has continued to do so ever since.
Swift was born in London, and has lived there all his life, not far from his suburban childhood haunts. Part of that remarkable generation of Granta Best of Young British Writers selected in 1983, which included Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Pat Barker and Rose Tremain, he has won far fewer column inches and photo shoots than most of his peers, in part, no doubt, because of his innate reticence. Fellow novelist Allan Massie has suggested that such neglect has been good for his career, allowing him to focus on his writing. Whether or not that is true, his friend Ishiguro has described him as a "profile-writer's nightmare because he is so quiet and stable".
Yet it could be the very lack of fireworks in Swift's domestic life (so far as one can tell) that has given him the space to observe and think, free from the distracting melodrama that makes some writers' lives much more interesting than their books. Instead, this masterly explorer of the aching English heart is also one of the most beautifully simple writers you will ever find, his sentences smooth and clean as a sea-washed stone.
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