Review
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Swimmer is Bill Broady's lyrical literary debut: the
story of a young female swimmer, a Commonwealth gold medallist,
who escapes the peculiar loneliness of family and school life by
finding her element in the water. It's a strange and melancholy
tale: "Your first and last memories were of butterflies ...
Before Dad's identification you'd named it already, in the
fast-receding synaesthetic language of babyhood, MRRLYMBRXBRX".
"You" is the unnamed swimmer; the novel is Broady's address to a
girl who, at the very beginning of the book, has had her first
and last memories: the butterflies who enthuse a child with a
wish to fly that becomes the wish and talent to swim. In the
first half of the book, the cast of characters is ready and
waiting: Mum, Dad, Coach, budding champion and her competitive
rivals. But nothing is quite as expected: "Stupidity! Stolidity!
Senselessness!" is Dad's parody of Coach's "Strength! Stamina!
Suppleness!", while Mum swigs gin in the bathroom. And Coach's
commitment has its own price, one that is followed through in the
disturbing sequel to the swimmer's success. At 19, her athletic
career all but over, the swimmer is passed on to Coach Two, an
agent who helps her to find, or lose, her way in the world of
"promo": the money, sleaze and sex of the night clubs and glamour
modelling that emerge as the pinnacle of Coach Two's ambitions.
It's a maddening world, literally, for the swimmer--and for the
reader who follows her journey back to the "time before speech"
and the early pleasures of butterflies. --Vicky Lebeau
Synopsis
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She swims into the medals and then into oblivion -- a
sensuous, searing, compact debut from an outstanding new British
writer. This is a striking, supple and direct debut from a new
English writer that both promises an exceptionally exciting
future and provides an unusual, accomplished and saleable debut.
It's a character piece, charting the life of a girl who becomes
besotted with butterflies and swimming on the same holiday when
an infant, then grows up to become a world-class swimmer before,
at 19, obsolescence overtakes her with disorienting haste...If
taken on its own terms -- as an intense and focused portrait --
it is simply staggering; a miniature, but a perfect one. It is
stuffed with gorgeously apt and fresh imagery and has tremendous
verve about it. It reads, in fact, like a race, as it should.
From the Back Cover
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"A skewed fairy tale, a hymn to water… Broady's descriptions of
swimming are supple, fluid and memorable."
THE TIMES
"'You don't need to fly… that's what your imagination's for!"
says the girl's her on finding his five-year-old daughter
sprawled among the zinnias after leaping from the bathroom
window, but she has acquired the taste for it, splashing and
flying in the water at Worthing… The price she pays for her
constant communion with the water, her ability to soar and fly
beyond the dreams of ordinary mortals, is the competition
circuit. Childhood and puberty are spent powering up and down
pools, fighting pain, exhaustion and the water's changing moods.
Echoing the aspirations of its heroine, Broady's stunning
narrative seems to hover in its own distinctive element and, at
times, to soar and fly. In prose of poetic precision and
poignancy, he touches on the deepest dreams of the human heart."
CHRISTINA PATTERSON, 'Observer'
Broady's terse, lyrical tragedy is a devastating, highly focused
study of talent and the slave trade in talent. The originality of
its subject matter, its remarkable poetic cohesion, and Broady's
lack of piousness, passionately argue broad social and moral
criticisms which resonate well beyond the specifically English
terrain explored… A beautifully unified first novel."
BILL BROUN, 'TLS'
"This slim but sensuously written first novel explores the psyche
of a female athlete of extraordinary grace whose career is
cruelly brief, overtaken by still more ruthlessly driven
teenagers. Broady's book describes the life of a person so used
by others she hardly knows how to experience her own self.
Poignant and lyrical."
ESQUIRE
"The most interesting first novel this year – a dark and shiny
account of the butterfly stroke, competitive sports and madness."
EMILY PERKINS, 'Guardian'
About the Author
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bill broady lives and works in Yorkshire. This astonishing debut
is the fruit of Littlewoods’ largesse. He has also written and
published some poetry and short stories in, amongst others, The
London Magazine, Poetry Now, Sofa, Printer’s Devil, The Big
Issue, Artscene and The Dalesman.
