Swift writes about accidents, plays with the idea of them, but leaves little room even for apparent ones. He is like her, he thinks, not ‘funny in the head, but like her for having been played a trick on’. The ‘accident of birth’ he has in mind is that of his adoptive sister, born handicapped. In Graham Swift’s latest novel Vince remembers thinking that answering questions about what he wants to be is dangerous: making one choice, communing just once with fate, will seal his identity for good. But he falls prey to something which is beyond his control, something bound to happen to someone who tries to play God. ‘And more curses,’ his son continues, ‘more curses perhaps, as yet unknown.’ The watchmaker, who believes clocks not only record time but cause it, invents a watch which will prolong his life. But even ill luck sounds too much like accident. Pumping the water out of the dead body, he tries to pump away ‘all the ill luck of his life’ that took his wife, that ‘had his first son born a freak’. Henry Crick in Waterland is too superstitious to believe in accidents. ‘Accident’ here means what we call an accident when we can’t face the fact that even this was predetermined.
I didn’t know that phrase then but I learnt it later. So they ain’t no different really from accidents of birth.
No repetition of that neat word ‘accident’ can stop the siren in his brain.Īnd I see them all hanging up before me, like clothes on a rack, all the jobs, tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, and you have to pick one and then you have to pretend for the rest of your life that that’s what you are. it was proof against age and against all those processes by which we are able to say that a man’s time runs out, but it was not proof against external accident.įor when a body floats into a lock kept by a lock-keeper of my father’s disposition, it is not an accident but a curse.Īnd Freddie Parr’s father. My great-grandfather’s watch did not confer immortality.
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