Brain Surgery

By Pico Iyer

EVER AFTER

by Graham Swift

Knopf; 276 pages; $21

Readers who devoured Waterland a few years ago will remember finding in Graham Swift's novel an inventiveness common to many of the younger British novelists -- Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan -- matched with a sense of inquiry and of mystery that is not so common. Waterland was a novel electric with ideas. Yet in his intricate narrative of generations and degenerations, Swift achieved something remarkable: a dense, literary text that raced ahead with the compulsive fury of a page turner.

In Ever After, Swift has managed the feat again, devising a hypnotically complex examination set amid the circular staircases and false fronts of a strange man's brain. The monologist is Bill Unwin, 52, an honorary fellow of a Cambridge college who begins his tale with "These are, I should warn you, the words of a dead man." Three weeks earlier, he was rescued from "attempted self-slaughter." Now, immured in his unreal world, he recalls, simultaneously, his boyhood in Paris, his discovery of the diary of a 19th century forebear, his life as the husband of an actress and his anguished puzzlement at his father's death and his mother's remarriage. A latter-day Hamlet, Unwin is driven mad by the sense that all of us are playacting, adrift in a world of "suppose's."

As the posthumous man unravels his tale, he twists and turns around an extraordinary tangle of ideas: the nature of artifice, the Darwinian crisis of faith, the courtship of History and Romance. Invoking his ancestor Sir Walter Raleigh, and setting much of the action in the New Elizabethan Age of the 1950s, he fashions a narrative as fiendishly witty and sinuous and fluent as an Elizabethan sonnet. But at its heart is a simple, all but unanswerable question: "What is the difference between belief and make-belief?" Some readers may be exhausted by the pinwheeling frenzy of paradoxes and parallels; others, though, will be exhilarated by Swift's ability to make his terminally cerebral subject readable, and real. And they will be touched, too, by a moving breakthrough at the end that suggests Swift, unlike many of his contemporaries, really does believe that "no breadth of intellect exonerates want of feeling." Ever After is a supremely intelligent novel about the need to transcend intelligence.