ONE SWIFT SUMMER by R. J. ASKEW
Dat is Het. That’s what Vincent van Gogh used to say whenever he encountered a book or a painting possessing that indefinable quality for which no word exists in any language.
If he were alive today I do not doubt he would say of R J Askew’s One Swift Summer also: “Dat is het.” (Trans. That is It.)
Definitions might vary, but for me“Het” is a quality that transcends time, and is the mark of a work that is truly inspired. It is a quality that leaves a person speechless, even the normally garrulous. I was not expecting to discover “Het” when I started reading One Swift Summer, because one finds it so infrequently. But this is a book that flies as high above its contemporaries as its eponymous swifts and if you don’t believe me, I suggest you start reading it.
I normally avoid literary fiction. I find it mostly self-indulgent and almost always pretentious. But there’s nothing self-indulgent or pretentious about One Swift Summer. Dat is Het, after all.
One reading of this book can never be enough, and I will revisit it one day, although preferably in paperback. Now for the difficult bit – describing One Swift Summer, something I find well nigh impossible. On one level this book is a paean to nature, and a corresponding attack on the unnaturalness of modern life. “Maybe we are even more what we watch than what we eat…” says the main character, who spends his days watching the swifts in Kew Gardens, that “sweetest of smiles on the face of London.”
But it’s also a story and a great story too, populated with a cast of characters so perfectly drawn that they spring off the page, like the businessman with his “titanium halo of success,” or the middle aged woman “performing her devotions on the altar of that little Dell of hers.”
It is my prediction that this book will stand the test of time, and go on to become a classic of British nature-literature, of poetic literature. The down side of all that will be all the uber-boring literary critics who will start writing uber-boring articles about it. But that will be a small price to pay to see this book take its rightful place in the canon.
You can view One Swift Summer on Amazon Here.
margaret eleanor leigh 