In his next novel after Waterland, the undeservedly less admired Out of This World, Graham Swift again attempts a large-scale history of the twentieth Century principally in terms of its warfare. This is told by way of the family history of the Beeches, whose wealth is founded on armaments manufacture, devel- oped especially by the one-armed father, Robert Beech, VC (whose Tife spanned the full galloping gamut of the twentieth centur’ (OTW 11)), and disowned by his son Harry, one of the novel's two main narrative voices. Harry becomes first an aerial photographer with the RAF in the Second World War and then a war photographer in all the trouble spots of the post-war world. In 1972, ten years before the novel opens, he has given up this career after his father is blown to pieces by a bomb planted in his car by the IRA, although he continues to do some flying and photography. Harr's Greek wife, Anna, has been killed in an air crash years earlier, leaving Sophie, Harr's only child and the other main narrative voice in the novel. She is increasingly alienated from her often absent father, and cuts herself off from him totally after her beloved grandfather's death, seeing Harry's moral nullity as somehow implicated in that event. When the novel opens ('April 1982’ - this time, the date of ‘the present’ is given a page to itself at the beginning of the book, and April, as we shall see, seems to have some talismanic significance for Swift), Sophie, who lives in New York with her travel-agent husband, Joe, and is undergoing psycho- analysis, is on an aeroplane with her 9-year-old twin sons flying to England to make a reconciliation with Harry (OTW 201-2). Harry, aged just 64 and also flying in a Cessna light aircraft in the absolute present of the novel (OTW 38-9, 189), is living in a cottage in Wiltshire, having fallen in love with a 23-year-old woman, Jenny, who is prégnant with their child and whom he has left on the ground at the airfield. The novel is primarily narrated by way of the fragmentary ‘confessions’ of Harry and Sophie in 1982: Harr's, a mental apologia to Sophie to which we are party, while Sophie's is to Dr Klein, her psychiatrist.