At least, they are there in his imagination. He is the 50-something Tom Crick, and the framing device is that he is addressing all this to the young people in his classes. It’s a random-seeming, fortuitous process, but he wants to fit it into both a coherent story of a life and into the bigger history that it’s his job to teach. He doesn’t reject it, but offers other ways of presenting history and histories. The ‘fairy-tale’ idea is there to prepare us for a version of history he wants to confront head-on. The fractured, intersecting timelines perfectly match his narrator’s obsession with how the ‘here and now’ of personal experience coalesces over time into one man’s own history. But it isn’t why I thought this was one of the best novels I had ever read, which has much more to do with the way Swift tells it. I’ll come back to Swift’s description of it in these early chapters-which, after all this time, I still think is spot-on. I first read it shortly after moving to Fenland for a few years, and I was still finding the landscape very strange. But we lived in a fairy-tale place.’ Re-reading this novel after something like 37 years is a big thing for me.
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