Into the darkness

England and Other Stories
Graham Swift
Simon & Schuster
2015, pp 480, Rs 360

An undertow of melancholy tugs at Graham Swift’s characters, threatening to pull them under — or at least backward. Time is a Moebius strip in his stories — time present contiguous with a Faulknerian time past and shadowed by secrets the reader only slowly pieces together. This is true of Swift’s early work, like Waterland, and his Booker Prize-winning novel, Last Orders, and it’s truer still of his new collection, England and Other Stories.

The tales in this volume tend to be short, dense narratives that unfold, origami-style, into complex meditations on characters’ lives, tales with vistas as panoramic as those in the stories of Alice Munro. Some judicious pruning of minor entries in this volume would have resulted in a tighter, more reliably rewarding collection. But the most powerful stories in England and Other Stories showcase Swift’s talents as a writer: his gift for psychological observation, his sure sense of craft, his ability to distill nuanced emotional truths from the effluvia of ordinary life.

The literary self-consciousness that hobbled some of his earlier work has largely fallen away here, giving way to pared down narratives, which, at their best, resonate with the power of understatement.

Swift tends to write in a minor key, and there have long been Larkinesque clouds of disappointment wafting over his characters’ lives. Mortality — whether arriving in the form of an accident or illness or as the punctuation point at the end of a long life — looms large in these stories. Many of the characters are in late middle age or at the very least at a vantage point where they can look back at the landscape of their lives and see an emerging pattern.

An eminent doctor likes to tell the story of how his father, born in India before Independence, ended up in England after being badly wounded in Normandy during World War II; and how he himself became a physician because of the mentorship of the doctor who helped save his father’s life (“Saving Grace”). A divorced father of two thinks back on the day when he and his young bride went to see a lawyer to draw up their wills, and he wrote her an intense love letter that he failed to give her (“Remember This”). A professor of Greek recalls his childhood when an eccentric neighbour named Mr Wilkinson — who would be chased from the community for being “a weirdo” — ignited a passion for mythology and so, inadvertently, determined the course of his life (“Ajax”).

“Isn’t it a sad thing, Jimmy,” Mr Wilkinson said, “that one of the great heroes of the Greek myths, one of the most glorious of those who fought in the Trojan War, should be reduced to being a tin of scouring powder?” The narrator says he owes to this chance remark not only “a whole world of narrative and magic and meaning” — and, in a sense, his vocation as a scholar — but also a lasting fascination “with all the strange turns and twists and evolutions this world can take, all the bizarre changes of fortune, for good and bad, it can offer.”

The most striking of Swift’s stories share qualities of unexpectedness and inevitability, underscoring the strange alchemy by which temperament combines with past experience and chance and sometimes impulsive choices to determine the shape of one’s fate. Several stories involve love triangles, or the ghosts of relationships with a dead spouse or lost child that haunt the here and now.

Two tales gently tease out connections among characters’ supremely ordinary lives and happenings in the wider world. “Going Up in the World,” about a window washer turned successful businessman, becomes a kind of parable about the boom of the early millennium and the coming crash of 2008. And “Lawrence of Arabia” movingly recounts the story of a woman mourning her dead husband, whose passing becomes linked, in her mind, to the world’s mourning, at the same time, of Nelson Mandela and Peter O’Toole.

“Two hours after Roy had gone,” the narrator says, “and I was thinking about Peter O’Toole. Or thinking about Lawrence of Arabia. Or not thinking about either of them, since I was thinking about that man in the fluttering white robes, who only ever existed in a film.”
The lesser stories in this book are more synthetic affairs. In one laboured tale, a 12-year-old boy contemplates taking a knife from the kitchen drawer and stabbing his mother’s boyfriend (“Knife”). In another, a widowed osteopath begins a dubious affair with one of his patients (“Half a Loaf”).

Had such entries been left on the cutting room floor, England and Other Stories would have been a pensive, virtuosic collection. As it stands, it’s a lovely tapestry of stories with some unfortunate unraveled threads.