Reading Contemporary writing is a rather different exercise from reading texts that come from earlier literary periods, in that it means attaining a different kind of historical sense: a sense not of reconstructing the past in which an older text was written, but of grasping the contemporary text's present historical moment as it is being lived and experienced. In other words, to read Graham Swift's fiction requires us to situate it in its own cultural ambience and to try and decipher what it tells us about - and what positions it takes up towards - the world that determines it and that it addresses. This implies a more immediately engaged mode of reading: what we may call a ‘politics of reading’. As we have seen, the world that Swift's novels invoke is that of ‘the present’ as a postmodern wasteland: indelibly marked by destructive twentieth-century wars; consumerist, careless and selfish; dominated by factitious images on film and TV; emotionally null - with ‘love’ a prime casualty; the possibility of reaching any certain ‘truth’ a chimera; over- shadowed by the necessarily vicarious ‘experiencing’ of nuclear holocaust; and with ‘the End of Histor’ nigh. Our decision (implying its ‘politics’) about how to respond to this world view is central to a reading of Swift's fiction.

For we are left to judge whether the world the texts allude to is one we can square with the world we experience in our daily lives - whether we think: ‘no, this is merely the jaundiced view of an over-fastidious novelist alienated from the dynamics of contemporary culture'; or alternatively: ‘yes, that is how it seems; I can recognize and identify with that’. But what is equally a part of our ‘politics of reading’ is how we react to the challenges the novels offer to their prevailing contextual world, for Swift does not merely identify a Contemporary wasteland but seems to suggest an antidote to it. And the central possibility for redemption (apart from ‘telling stories’), put very simply, is ‘love’ - if only as a minimal and vulnerable eventuality. However, it is worth bearing in mind that, with a sophisticated, self-conscious novelist like Swift, all his representations of the contextualizing world are those of his first-person narrators, and can therefore never be taken unproblematically to be the unmediated views of the author.