This is my second Swift novel. I read this one because it has historical elements to it that I think might be useful in my study of twentiety century British literature.
Bill Unwin narrates the events of his life, his research and muses on the correlations between the two. His wife recently committed suicide, and he tried to follow but survived. Thanks to his stepfather, a plastics manufacturer, he has a chair at a prestigious university (not sure which one) and is working on preparing the diary of a Victorian relative, Matthew, who left his wife and family after revealing to them (and his rector-father in law) that the theory of evolution had persuaded him to the point of losing his faith in creationism. His wife kept the notebooks, a love letter, and the clock that his father had built, passing the clock down to Bill and his wife Ruth (who died childless). Bill interprets this to mean that she still loved him when he died. Bill draws parallels between the family's sense of destiny and his own, and in particular, he wonders at his wife's profession of actress - a putting on of characters that other people see, but Bill thinks repeatedly of the woman he knew - the one who studied her lines by pacing through the backyard, smoking and gesticulating as she memorized and tried out out different versions of them.
Bill accuses/muses that his stepfather is guilty of a kind of reverse colonialism (Sam, his stepfather, is American, was carrying on an affair with his mother in Paris, when Sam's spy-father shot himself, either out of guilt caused by spying, or because his wife was having an affair).
Most of the narrative is a recollection, and in its telling, Bill seems to work through some of the parts of his grief. In other ways, the narrative seems to deny knowledge, such as when Bill tries to imagine why someone would kill themselves (even though he presumably should know why he tried). He frequently leaves words unsaid, represented by the "--" but it is always clear what word he has omitted. This activity does not introduce confusion or multiplicity into the text, it rather induces in the reader as sense of Bill's squeamishness in dealing with emotions and relationships - some of the more delicate parts of life.
In producing large parts of Matthew's 'diary', Swift introduces the inventor Brunel, the Victorian debates about God and evolution, and their attitudes toward nature and society, and it reproduces Victorian attitudes to life. In reading these passages, it is easy to forget that the did not exist outside this text, and the parallels with the angst that Bill is working through are frequently drawn. Some of the connections made are less clear. Bill grows up in Alderston, a town that had a reputation later for protest but the reason for the introduction of this parallel is not immediately clear.
Having just read Golding's The Paper Men, I find similar sentiments expressed by both protagonists - which begs an interesting question about the motivation/attitude of the author's writing the stories (Bill also sounds a lot like the narrator of Swift's Waterland).