Out of This World (Hardcover)

by Graham Swift (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Any doubt that Swift, whose Waterland was nominated for England's Booker Prize, is one of the very best young British novelists should be dispelled by this beautifully written, stinging study of a family torn apart by guilt and anger. Harry Beech is a renowned photographer who specializes in recording the horrifying and grotesque; now pursuing his occupation from airplanes, he prefers to stay literally above the fray, an observer shielded by his lens. His estranged daughter Sophie, although grown and living in New York, has never forgiven him for his emotionally aloof behavior. As she struggles, with a psychiatrist's help, to keep from crumbling under the weight of her loneliness and resentment, she hears from Harry, who wants to reconcile. In chapters that alternate their voices, the author unlayers the events that created their riftparticularly the terrorist slaying of Sophie's grandfather, an arms manufacturerwhile exposing the different, equally tragic common past that may eventually reunite them. This is a powerful meditation on global and familial violence, written in prose of unerring grace and emotional precision. Paperback rights to Pocket.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
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. (Kirkus Reviews) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: Poseidon Press; First Edition edition (September 1988)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0671658271
• ISBN-13: 978-0671658274
• Shipping Weight: 13.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #3,294,109 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A powerful, brutal history of a 20th Century family, May 15, 1996

By A Customer

This review is from: Out of This World (Paperback)

Graham Swift is a proven master of the brooding British drama and he continues here with a history of a family spanning several decades, wars and generations. Swift plumbs the depths of parental guilt, photographers' responsibility and terrorism. You emerge from this book battered but feeling a bit more clear about life in general.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Tragedy, and Reconciliation Spanning Three Generations., February 20, 2000

By	"james_m_b" (Malvern, PA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Out of This World (Paperback)

When Harry Beech refers to his fiancee as "She's out of this world." he reveals a happy conclusion to a life wrought with the kind of unspoken trauma not often made public. Although growing up in and inheriting monetary affluence, he has strained relationships with both his father, a physically disabled WWI veteran, and his daughter, child of his deceased wife. Emerging from a labyrinth of personal crisis, in the backdrop of the 20th century, Harry Beech does manage to mend his life and find some degree of lasting happiness. This work is deeply moving in a way that causes one to reexamine the "constants" which ordinarily typify modern life.