By Graham Swift. Random House Canada, 400 pp, $32.95, hardcover

The elephant of fable is a thing of parts—that snaky trunk, those treelike limbs—and so, too, is a life, which is more or less what we get in this fascinating compilation of previously uncollected ephemera from acclaimed English author Graham Swift.

Or part of a life, at any rate. Making an Elephant: Writing From Within proceeds in flickers and glimpses: here an affectionate memory of the author's father; there an adventure story from Swift's backpacking days on the hippie trail; elsewhere an account of Christmas dinner with fellow novelist Salman Rushdie, then in hiding from an ayatollah's curse.

Other areas of his experience are left blank, or nearly so. Swift alludes to meeting the woman he would spend his life with, for instance, but beyond the occasional mention of “my wife”, his domestic life goes largely unexplored. To know more about Graham Swift, the man, we will have to wait for some future biographer's revelations. Yet the assorted reminiscences, interviews, and poems assembled here do give a comprehensive overview of Graham Swift, the writer.

What's particularly striking is his abiding faith in the power of the imagination. “After well over three decades of being a writer of fiction, I still believe that fiction—storytelling—is a magical thing,” he writes in the introduction. Later on, in an interview with novelist Patrick McGrath, he revisits that notion, with a caveat. “It's important for fiction to be magical,” he contends, “just as it's important for fiction to embrace the real world, to look really hard at the real world.”

These are themes that emerge in varied and subtle ways. In recalling the poet Ted Hughes, for instance, Swift celebrates their shared love of fishing, and finds in the particulars of a Devon stream an allegorical connection to the act of writing, “that concentrated dealing with surface and depth”.

And that's a good way of looking at this patchwork autobiography: Making an Elephant may skim over the surface of Swift's life, but reading it will add real depth to anyone's understanding of his work.