Graham Swift, Mothering Sunday (Scribner)If you want to spend all day reading, you'll need more than this book or you could read it twice. It is very short but would be well worth going over again.
Jane Fairchild is in domestic service with one family and having an illicit affair with the son at a nearby house. He is shortly due to be married when she assumes she will lose him and the story is set on Mothering Sunday when maids are given the day off to visit their mothers. Jane doesn't have a mother so she visits Paul for what will be their last day together before he is married.
She is also an orphan which means that her name, and birthday, was given to her like a character in a book and she eventually grows up to be a writer, which gives the novel all those literary levels of extra significance and reason for the book to reflect on its own status as literature. Some readers might have seen enough of this kind of literariness by now and object to it but I haven't. I'm happy to read and write about books that are about books that are about books. For a while longer at least.
I have not read all of Graham Swift by any means but I haven't yet read one that doesn't have bereavement as a central theme. It happens in this novel at halfway so we have a blissful lingering of Jane's last day with Paul followed by a gradual revelation of the shocking event. There is much memorable writing along the way, the book is a prose poem - for want of a better term - but none of it caught my attention as much as the way death is caused by contingent circumstances. The car has hit an oak tree on a bend in the road,
It was more of a corner in fact, indicating perhaps where surveyors and landowners had failed to agree.
Would be writers are often told to show, not tell, as if by following a litany of such sound professional advice, they will all become successful, well-known and celebrated. I don't think it quite works like that. Swift tells his story but also shows much more. At the end, by which time the book has become more of a meditation on fiction, it says that it is,
more about being true to the very stuff of life, it was about trying to capture, though you never could, the very feel of being alive.
This might look dangerously as is Swift were being didactic and making a manifesto had he not done as much so convincingly throughout these beautifully imagined pages.
The pscychology, the lingering, the nakedness of emotion and the nakedness itself are, as it were, tellingly achieved and if Swift has written a better book, I'd like to know about it.
I have an awkward feeling that I'm dishing out too many highly commendatory reviews at the moment. I can hardly remember a time when I've enjoyed reading quite so much. This is excellent. I'd much prefer a book to be short and as good as this than four times longer and not as good. Never mind the width, feel the quality.
