Graham Swift, Twelve Post-War Tales

Graham Swift, Twelve Post-War Tales (Scribner)

Graham Swift can't be the greatest living English fiction writer while there's Julian Barnes. If all his books were as good as Mothering Sunday, he'd be a contender but they're not. He is, however, essential and any new title is ordered without question, not because it says on the cover he won the Booker Prize for something else but because it says 'Graham Swift'.

As a book of stories collected under such a title, we are invited to find resonances in these so-called 'ordinary' lives with 'big' moments in recent history although now 80 years on from WW2, we can't be confident that we will always be Post-War. Perhaps it is even expected that there is some overall network of correspondance between the quotidien and the world-shattering. But surely most things are a bit more random than that. Although the Spanish Civil War is crucial to Passport and the classic 'where were you when JFK was assassinated' is brought into service and, of course war, pandemic and bad government all affect lives beyond their primary casualties, other less monumental things happen, too.

Time and again, Swift is brilliant at capturing human behaviour. These are slow stories, maybe 'vignettes', sometimes with hardly any plot but with the significant events in the past, like in Beauty,

Was she beautiful? Or had he in some unaccountable way gifted beauty upon her? 

which is 'the eyes of the beholder' revisited but gently questions any absolute idea of what it means.

As with any writer, or artist, that one has read 'everything' by, one gets the idea of how they do it and it becomes exponentially harder for them to impress yet again but Hinges stood out as a masterpiece with its understanding of the issues involved in a family funeral. The necessary decorum required in the service has a corollary in that of the writing. Bereavement is more than a theme in Swift's writing, it looks like an obsession that perhaps a biographer could explain one day. 

We all arrive at a 'certain age' and it's unlikely we will swerve in our direction and so more of the same is not only to be expected but to be treasured and glad of. Perhaps we should all subscribe to The Oldie although we might not want to be explicit about our taste being entirely dependent on our date of birth. One waits long enough for a new title by a writer like Graham Swift and it's gone in a couple of days. 

Twelve Post-War Tales might not in due course appear in many lists of the greatest books of the early C21st but it is ideal reading material, enjoyable for what it is like a perfect companion. Given the choice between reading it and reading something else, one obviously reads it.