Swimmer is a slim novel by British author Bill Broady, that tells the story of a young girl who goes mad. She is a swimmer, and she devotes her youth to the sport. She is not close to her alcoholic mother, and she soon grows distant from her father, whose advice often rings in her head. As her swimming career ends while she is still a teenager, she starts to lose direction. She starts to have indiscriminate sex apparently without pleasure, and certainly without love. She is used by her manager and as her minor celebrity starts to fade, she becomes increasingly desperate to do anything which she can take some pride in. But she loses control of her life and then her mind.

Really the high point of the novel is the climax of the swimmer’s career: her big win. "It was as if for a few seconds you were fused with all the people who were being born or dying, killing or making love, working or just idly watching some swimming match on TV… the horizontal became vertical and you flew in a wild spiral, you body shaking as if it were about to break apart. And just as you touched to finish it struck you that this pain wasn’t a fifth element, but the thing that somehow held all the others together, that pumped your blood, set the tides, kept the stars in their courses — and that another name for it was love."

The narrator speaks to the swimmer, telling her how she felt, what she did, and what happened to her. This method of telling the story works well in conveying a sense of sadness and alienation. The swimmer seems utterly isolated, and her lapse into psychosis is just the inevitable end of her journey. The effect of the second-person mode of narrative is to make the reader a voyeur, overhearing the voice that talks to the madwoman.

So Broady’s novel manages to convey powerful feelings. But it is ultimately a literary device and this trajectory of mental illness has no discernible basis in reality or relation to the actual experience of psychosis. Swimmer is more of an exercise in creating a psychological atmosphere than an elucidation of the inner world of mental illness. The many references to British life and popular culture may mystify non-British readers.

Categories: Fiction