Making an Elephant: Writing from Within by Graham Swift

Like Montaigne, Swift is excited by pretty well anything of human concern, interest and puzzlement. Memories of fishing with Ted Hughes in Devon combine with appreciations of the Russian writer Isaac Babel and the charms of suburban Croydon, where Swift grew up. With a few deft strokes, Swift conjures the Croydon of his childhood and education at Dulwich College, the alma mater of Raymond Chandler. Droll appraisals of nearby Crystal Palace (with its life-size model dinosaurs), Norwood and Sydenham are among the many other delights on offer. Swift has an eye for the poetry of these places, with their Pooterish values.

His tribute to the poet Alan Ross, who for 40 years edited the legendary London Magazine, is especially moving.

When Alan died of a heart attack on St Valentine's Day 2001, those who knew him were devastated. From his office in South Kensington, Alan helped to launch the careers of, among others, Derek Walcott, William Boyd, Jonathan Raban as well as Swift. A few terse remarks sent on a postcard served as thanks for a contribution. ("Very nicely done, but your spelling is atrocious," was one such I received). Ross remains, as Swift says, "the best and most unsung supporter of young writers there was", and it's good to have him commemorated so affectionately.

Among the writer friends celebrated here are Caryl ("Caz") Phillips and Kazuo ("Ish") Ishiguro, cultural inbetweeners who, by virtue of their foreign birth, challenge the meaning of "British" or "English" fiction. Swift first met Phillips, the West Indian-born novelist, during a literary festival in earnest, multicultural Toronto. Talking to him, Swift came to see the Caribbean as a multi-shaded community of nations, at once parochial and international in its collision of African and European cultures. Toronto's own intermingling of Indian, Chinese and East European communities makes it a similarly "modern" society — one with a cosmopolitan character all its own — and evidently this appeals to Swift.

For all the mandarin diversity of his interests, however, Swift remains a London novelist; Waterland, his Norfolk masterwork, was set partly in Greenwich. For 30-odd years now Swift has lived in south London in the shadow of Wandsworth Prison. The essay on Wandsworth's local history — the River Wandle, the Royal Victoria Patriotic Asylum — completes an immensely readable volume. On every page, Swift emerges as a considerable essayist, who upholds the sterling virtue of good writing combined with emotional and intellectual engagement..

Synopsis by Foyles.co.uk

As a novelist Graham Swift delights in the possibilities of the human voice, imagining his way into the minds and hearts of an extraordinary range of characters. In "Making an Elephant", the voice is his own. As generous in its scope as it is acute in its observations, this highly personal book is a singular and open-spirited account of a writer's life. Swift brings together a richly varied selection of essays, portraits, poetry and interviews, full of insights into his passions and motivations, and wise about the friends, family and other writers who have mattered to him over the years. Kazuo Ishiguro advises on how to choose a guitar, Salman Rushdie arrives for Christmas under guard, and Ted Hughes shares the secrets of a Devon river. There are private moments, too, with long-dead writers, as well as musings on history and memory that readers of Swift's novels will recognize and love. A journey through place and time, "Making an Elephant" is a book of encounters, between a son and his father, between an author and his younger selves, between writer and reader, and between friends. It brims with charm and candour, and tells of alertness to experience and a true engagement with words, in short, with what it means to feel that writing and reading are an essential part of living.