Making an Elephant is one of those books which I thoroughly enjoyed from the moment it arrived through the post - a nicely designed and substantial book with plenty of interesting content (including quite a few well-chosen photographs). And from a favourite author, providing considerable insight into the writer's life, with illustrations and stories aplenty.
Swift writes on a vast range of topic, and rarely fails to please. I first came to his work through Waterland, one of those books which managed to draw me into a wholly believable yet utterly strange landscape (in this case The Fens) which I had never encountered before. Since then I lingered in the Fens while on a business trip to King's Lynn, a journey which I found myself interpreting through my memories of Waterland.
Then Last Orders came along and quite rightly won the Booker Prize (and was later filmed so effectively with Michael Caine, Tom Courtenay and others). Since then I've read most of Swift's books and enjoyed them all so it was difficult to resist this varied collection of pieces from such a wide range of sources.
In Making An Elephant, we find episodes from Swift's life, illustrated by short articles, portraits of other writers, interviews, poems and essays. It is an ideal book to dip into, but I found myself reading the whole thing over a couple of days, conscious that it is also a book I will enjoy having on my shelves to refer to when thinking about the writing process or just wanting to recall some of the evocative scenes described in it.
The book contains some nice stories. I enjoyed reading about Swift's year in Greece as a young man, and his discovery of the Russian writer Isaac Babel, who accompanied him almost as a friend through the pages of his Collected Stories. I then read how Graham took his friend Kazuo Ishiguro ("Ish") to help him choose a new guitar, ending up with a beautiful hand-made Spanish guitar on which he sometimes "murders Bach" after a hard day's writing. I agree with him that "playing a musical instrument "tells you quite a lot about the mysterious process of discovering what you have inside".
For anyone wanting to understand Swift's book Waterland there is a transcript of an in-depth interview with Swift, conducted by Patrick McGrath (another fine writer), which provides a huge amount of background information on this remarkable book.
The poems are accessible and evocative. I enjoyed The Bookmark for example in which he writes about books which he started to read long ago but never finished:
for an old crinkly-spined paperback and settle down,
But something stops you before you've begun:
The bus ticket falling from page thirty-one
A bus ticket, yellowed and frail,
Like the pages themselves
And what you do you do?
You read the bus ticket, not the book.
Living by the sea as I do, I liked Swift's thoughts about our attraction to the coast in his essay, "I do like to be beside the seaside":
There is so much to mention in this book its hard to know what to leave out in this review. However, the eponymous essay, "Making an Elephant", is Swift's memorial to his father, in which he managed to revive memories of my own childhood through his descriptions of a 1950s Sydenham, South London, in which I also spent quite a bit of time. One of my uncles had a Vauxhall Wyvern like Swift's father's, "curvaceous and thickly chromed". My own father had only a Ford Popular but I, like Swift, made journeys in the passenger seat of the Ford along Crystal Palace Parade, with views of London to the north having a "fairy-tale aura . . a sea of lights, a black bowl of jewels".
Later, Swift makes a wooden elephant from three pieces of plywood glued together. His father suggests painting it yellow or pink from his impressive array of paint pots, but Graham chooses grey, "not a true elephant grey, but the only grey available, the one used in finishing off Airfix kits, battleship grey". The seriousness of children sometimes contrasts with the fantasies of adults.
I enjoyed a sample of local history in Swift's essay on Wandsworth, and agree with him that Wandsworth Common has "an intricacy, a sheltering fragmentedness, even bit of Sylvan semi-rusticity". I know what he means; the villages of London still leave their mark, giving great character to what at first impression can be vaguely seedy urban sprawl. Swift then writes in his room in Wandsworth about the process of writing, revealing that he writes his books with fountain pen and ink, believing that "a pen gets whatever is in your head onto the page more quickly and effectively than anything that's been invented".
Having skimmed through this book again in order to write this review, I don't think I'll be putting it on the shelf quite yet. I think its one I will want to dip into for the next few weeks at least. I'd recommend it to anyone who likes Swift's books, or someone who writes, or maybe just anyone who'd appreciate a rich anthology of good writing.
Note: I am pleased that this 100th review posted on A Common Reader is of a book I enjoyed so much and so matches the style and content I am trying to achieve.
