That you don’t really see the joins in the enterprise is credit to Barkham’s skill as a writer, but also as an organiser of content. ![]() But for the rest, we have to guess.ĭeakin records his life as if he knows that a book like this will one day be written about it In the introduction, he parses a brief section – Deakin’s visit to a Royal Navy ship in Venice – and tells us which paragraphs were Deakin and which Barkham. There are also, fascinatingly, passages written by Barkham in Deakin’s own voice. ![]() Deakin’s own observations are augmented by Barkham, who did extensive interviews with the writer’s friends, family and former lovers. In The Swimmer, Patrick Barkham – a fine author in his own right – takes this idea to its logical conclusion, mining and shaping that enormous, eccentric archive into a book that is, as far as we can make out, about four-fifths in Deakin’s own hand but reads like a first-person memoir. You think of Nicholas Shakespeare’s life of Bruce Chatwin, or Jonathan Coe on BS Johnson. During those strange days in Norfolk, I also stumbled into the university library, where I found, to my delight, the Roger Deakin archive: a vast collection of notebooks, letters and journals left by the writer on his death in 2006.Ī good literary biography is often a kind of joint venture between writer and subject. ![]() I swam under the spell of two books: Charles Sprawson’s Haunts of the Black Masseur and Roger Deakin’s Waterlog, each of which made swimming feel like an expression of the liberated self, a declaration of existential intent. The campus is just outside the town and overlooks a lake they call the Broad, where I spent much of my time. Not long after my first novel was published, I was invited to a writers’ symposium at UEA in Norwich.
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