This was first published in 1982 by London Magazine, who had already published some of the stories. Separated parents and dead parents are common themes, along with one parent having an affair that the other knows about. In "Seraglio" a childless couple return early from an Istanbul holiday because of an incident. The first-person male is calculatingly wordy. "The Tunnel" features a young couple trying to evade the girl's rich parents, holed up in a condemned London tower block. It has another thoughtful narrator. The plot too is carefully structured. The main character, confined to his flat, paints Gauguins on the walls, looks down at the school opposite which is due for demolition. He sees ex-schoolboys break in. They return each day to build an escape tunnel, propping it up with broken desks. God-like from his high vantage point he can see the schoolyard and the outside world that their tunnel's aiming for. On the day that he saw a hatch of grass raised outside the school by the diggers, the girl receives a letter about an inheritance.
"Hoffmeier's Antelope" ended tamely.
"The Watch" is a "curse of immortality" story in which an ageless man witnesses a birth with the cold-blooded objectivity common to this book's narrators
| those expanding eyes or mine saw a glistening, wet, purple-mottled object, like some wrinkled marble pebble, appear where the split began. This pebble grew - and grew - growing impossibly large for the narrow opening in which it seemed intent on jamming itself. For a whole minute, indeed, it stuck there, as if this were its final resting place, while the mother screamed. And then suddenly it ceased to be a pebble. It was a lump of clenched, unformed flesh, suffused with blood, aware that its position was critical. The mother gasped; it became a head, a gnarled, battered Punch-and-Judy head. The mother gasped again, this time with an audible relief and exultation; and it was no longer a head, but a whole creature, with arms and legs and little groping hands; and it was no longer caught in that awesome constriction but suddenly spilling out with slippery ease, like something poured from a pickle jar (p.109) |
In "Chemistry" a widower lives with his single-parent daughter. Conveniently for the plot, Grandpa does chemistry experiments in the shed. The grandson surprises him
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"What are you making, Grandpa?" "Not making - changing. Chemistry is the science of change. You don't make things in chemistry - you change them. Anything can change." (p.126) |
In the title story, Mrs Singleton sunbathes while watching Mr Singleton teaching their son, Paul (6), to swim in the sea. They're on holiday in Cornwall. She thinks about her unhappy marriage. Three times she's thought of leaving her husband because he's a boring engineer. They have sex monthly. The PoV switches to Mr Singleton - we're less close to him than we were to her. He's thought of leaving her because of her artistic pretentions. He was a good swimmer at 17, but his boring father told him to stop because training was getting in the way of exams. "He was distrustful of happiness as some people fear heights or open spaces."
Their relation is full of tactics - "She knew he only did it to hurt her, and so to feel guilty, and so to feel the remorse which would release his own affection for her, his vulnerability, his own need to be loved ...". "When Mrs Singleton became pregnant she felt she had outmanoeuvred her husband". She had erotic thoughts about her son ("He would become an artist, a sculptor. She would pose for him naked ... Mrs Singleton thought: All the best statues they had seen in Greece seemed to have been dredged up from the sea").
When she thinks Paul has got the hang of swimming she rushes to the water (flirtily to irritate her husband) and offers Paul an ice-cream. At the end it's Paul's PoV. He's scared of water - "If you do not swim you sank like a statue" (n.b. not like a stone). At the end "he kicked and struck, half in panic, half in pride, away from his father, away from the shore, away, in this strange new element that seemed all his own"". I like the ingredients but it's heavy-handed in too many places.
Other reviews
- Barry J. Fishman ( The collection was very well received in England, where Swift, though young, is already established as one of England's leading writers. In America, however, Learning to Swim received a much less favorable reception than did Waterland (published here in 1985), and in the words of Contemporary Authors (V.122) "more than one critic remarked that some of the tales seemed too studied and even uncompelling.")
- Alberto Piñera
- Michael Gorra (New York Times)
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