I don't know if Graham Swift belongs in the top echelon of the generation of fine English fiction writers that includes Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes and Alan Hollinghurst. There is a way in which he is not so consciously 'literary' but that shouldn't disqualify him from similar recognition. At present that group of novelists- not that they are a group in any meaningful way- seem to me some way ahead of their contemporaries in poetry but such attempts at judgement are best left aside when enjoyment is the real object of reading and Swift's new book is very enjoyable.
Twenty-five pieces that end on page 274 means they are easily assimilated, often a few at a time, and they are never complicated. They cover themes of childhood, marriage, relationships and death from a personal perspective. Whether they add up as a whole to a 'state of the nation' diagnosis from these selected vignettes is unproven but Swift's natural writing, an art that conceals art rather than advertises it, is consummately well done.
The stories that perhaps work least well are those from historical periods- the civil war, memories of World War I or the early C19th. Swift is apparently more comfortable in contempoary settings and these few pieces from longer ago don't really add sufficient deeper perspective to the collection.
But there are several powerful pieces, like Remember This that moves from the overwhelming happiness of the newly married to the loss of it. The 'mindless joie de vivre' of fatherhood precedes a dramatic incident of a dog attacking another child in a park in Dog. The motif of exhilaration and loss recurs in Half a Loaf as a middle aged man can hardly believe his luck to be having an affair with the yonger Tanya even though he knows full well it cannot last.
But my attention was really drawn to Ajax, a story of social 'respectability' and the expectations of a neighbourhood (rather than a community) that begins,
When I was a small boy we had a neighbour called Mr. Wilkinson, who was a weirdo.
'Weirdo' means lives alone and is educated. Yes, he does exercises in his underpants outside in his garden but that isn't against the law. There is a kind of misunderstanding that happens in Atonement that results in Mr. Wilkinson leaving and there is a nice, happy ending for everyone else when a normal family move into his house. It is a superb piece of social observation, about orthodoxy and perception. We might think of the case of Christopher Jeffries a few years ago for its relevance to the condition of England and the sinister implications of what might be 'middle class values'.
Swift takes different perspectives in each story to twist the angles and interpretation of contemporary living - a kind of generic, formulaic existence that moments of great light and sorrow only sometimes break into.
The last story gives its title to the collection, in which a coastguard on his way to work early in the morning helps a journeyman comedian on tour from his stranded vehicle. He is a black comedian from Yorkshire, for anybody who remembers Charlie Williams, and his bad jokes are a seemingly endless, not very funny, play on words based on the fact. The entertainer's itinerary takes him up, down and across England throughout the summer season playing 'theatres, corn exchanges, seaside palaces and pavilions and indeterminate halls'. And here we glimpse the wider perspective, the brief suggestion of the broader England ongoing around and beyond them, where their miniature cross-culture encounter is vastly bigger and both more difficult and as friendly and co-operative.
The book is about the value of a life, perhaps, and the divisions in it and, it being Swift, grief. In First on the Scene, a widowed walker continues to go on the walks he did with his wife and finds a young woman dead in one of their old favourite beauty spots.
He looked at the woman in her red top and saw, almost with a longing, the absolute absence the dead have even as they are there.
and
What a terrible thing it can be just to be on this earth.