SOURCE: "Static Pools," in New Statesman & Society, Vol. 121, No. 4072, February 21, 1992, p. 40.

In the following mixed review, Milne considers the structure and narrative voice of Ever After.

The past may be a foreign country, but Graham Swift's miserable male narrators feel far more at home there than in an uncomfortable present. Swift acquired a devoted following among East Anglia lovers with his 1983 novel, Waterland, in which a distraught schoolteacher seeks consolation by empathising intensively with his Fenland forebears. Musing on land reclamation and local brewing dynasties makes a pleasant change from contemplating forced early retirement and a born-again, baby-snatching wife.

Bill Unwin, the ineffectual ex-don at the centre of Ever After, is equally in need of historical distractions. He is holed up in a Cambridge college under false pretences, reeling from the deaths of his glamorous wife, an actress, and his glamorous mother, a professional femme fatale. Fortunately, Unwin...