SOURCE: "The Lost Boys," in New Statesman, Vol. 115, No. 2972, March 11, 1988, pp. 35-6.

Gilbert is an English novelist and editor. In the following review, she discusses the themes and narrative structure of Out of This World.

Fathers stalk through Graham Swift's novels like silent, mutilated giants. Their strangely-shaped shadows unfurl across the lives of the narrators, but their selves have always just turned a corner, disappeared into another room.

Swift's "psychological thriller" Shuttlecock, published in 1981, concerned the pursuit by a young married man of the truth about his father's wartime heroism, and its relevance to certain unsettling events in his own life. The Booker short-listed Waterland (1983) sought out not only a specific father, but ancestors, those whose lives are our history, in general.

Out of this World returns to the theme: its variation being that here Swift not only has a narrator-son but provides that son, in turn, with...