SOURCE: "Unwin Situation," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4638, February 21, 1992, p. 6.

In the following review, Sage examines the themes and structure of Ever After.

Graham Swift's last novel, Out of this World, was a "dry" book—abstracted, diagrammatic. There he levitated for once out of the mulch of family-plot emotions with the aid of a metaphor from aerial photography. This time [in Ever After] we're back on low-lying Waterland territory. Not the Fens, but a wet (tear-stained) world of stories that flow into each other like meandering tributaries joining their river. Again, it's a form of family saga, meditating on relations and filiations, past mysteries of birth, and a future without posterity except for the kind you can father in fiction.

The narrator, Bill Unwin, announces himself in the opening sentence as "a dead man". He is boasting, however: it's merely that he has survived the recent deaths...