Geology as a Metaphor in Graham Swift’s Ever After (1992)

Abstract

In Ever After, Graham Swift’s fifth novel, Matthew Pearce, the main narrator’s ancestor, is a Victorian surveyor who chronicles in his Notebooks how his reading of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830-1833) and Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) shattered his vision of the world, opening up “epistemological fault lines” and “yawning fractures” in his “teleological understanding” of human life: “If Lyell is right”, he exclaims, “if the world existed so long without Man upon it, why should we suppose . . . that we occupy any special and permanent place in Creation?” (Ever After, 135). This of course echoes the seismic debates between “creationists” and “evolutionists” that bisected Victorian society and which are often represented in neo-Victorian fiction. However, this is not the only fault line in the novel. The text itself of the Notebooks is fragmented, presented achronologically, used by the main late twentieth-century narrator, Bill Unwin, for his own ends, creating a feeling of unease and uncertainty in the reader, who feels the fictional ground beneath his/her feet moving and his/her reading comfort zone shaken. Geology and fault lines are thus very much an essential component of Swift’s novel, both literally and metaphorically.

Keywords

• Graham Swift
• Ever After
• neo-Victorian novel
• palaeontology
• ichthyosaurus geology
• Lyell