SOURCE: "By the Grace of the Teller," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4432, March 11-17, 1988, p. 275.

In the following review, Duchêne relates Swift's focus on storytelling, remembrance, knowledge, and family relations in Out of This World.

It cannot have been easy to follow Waterland, Graham Swift's last novel and a wonderfully dark-veined mass of story-telling, so perhaps it is not surprising that Swift chose for this new book [Out of This World] a very spare form—two rapidly antiphonal monologues, two or three supporting characters, very little physical setting. Happily, his themes remain constant: What do we know? What makes us think we know it? What do we do if we don't think we can know anything?

One suggested solution in Waterland to the discovery that "life includes a lot of empty space" was that "you can tell stories", and "telling", of a more confessional kind, is...