There are several wars, not all of them military ones, in these deftly turned stories from Booker winner Graham Swift. With characteristic exactness and compassion, Swift considers the cost of human conflict in all its forms – and the challenge, for those who manage to stay alive, of retrieving the past.
In The Next Best Thing former Leutnant Büchner, gatekeeping civic records in postwar Germany in 1959, fields a British serviceman’s attempts to trace the fate of his German Jewish relatives during the Holocaust. Denial and guilt vie chillingly in a tale about the agony of looking back when there are only “pathetic little scraps of paper” to be found. “What did they expect, after all, what did they really hope for,” Büchner wonders, “these needy and haunted ones who still, after 15 years, kept coming forward … To be given back the actual ashes, the actual dust, the actual bones?”
In Blushes the “ghost world” we’re shown is the suddenly empty one created by the Covid pandemic, with its unpeopled streets and rising death toll. Here the war being fought is the war against disease. Hinges, meanwhile, takes us into the thoughts of a middle-aged woman during her father’s funeral. As the coffin is brought to the cemetery she thinks back to a day when, as a girl, she waited with him for a carpenter to arrive and fix their creaking front door. The door, he’d explained, was 90 years old. Swift’s conceptual agility is on dazzling display here:
Neat as the parallel is, if these stories occasionally feel a little pat, it is precisely because they are so smoothly jointed. Sometimes the “hinge” involves a moment of slick linguistic doubleness. The carpenter in Hinges is called Joe Short – “As in ‘life is short’,” we’re reminded. In Black, another daughter makes sense of the way her angry coalminer father and his friends terrorised their families by concluding that “their place was the pit and they didn’t want pity”. The riddle of life, you suspect, isn’t that easily solved.
Where the moral focus is blurrier, the emotional payoff is often much greater. Beauty is a story of bereavement without a resolution: hoping for closure, a grandfather pays a secret visit to the university residence where his granddaughter Clare recently killed herself, only to feel like “an old man among ghostly young people”. The tale is a haunting palimpsest of shifting impressions. While the dean is showing him to Clare’s dorm, he’s incongruously aroused by her beauty. She tells him that the room “has now been cleared” and he notes that “there was the little collision of ‘Clare’ and ‘clear’. They were the same word.” But is anything clear? In this story the craving for life and the pull towards death are murkily intertwined. On the train back, even “the scudding fields and trees became obscure”. The image of dissolution tugs at the heart, without trying to reel us in.
Swift’s interest in what a meaningful reconstruction of the past might look like achieves an even deeper resonance in the final piece, Passport. Though she’s in her 80s and doesn’t expect to travel again, Anna-Maria Anderson has recently renewed this official proof of identity. She concedes ruefully that “there really was no way of travelling through time”, which is what she would really like to do. But of course, there is; this story is it. As she thinks, marvelling, of her parents’ love affair during the Spanish civil war and her own survival, as a baby, of the Blitz bomb that killed her mother, the piece becomes a moving reflection on the haphazardness as well as the serendipity of life. But it acknowledges something else too: the awkwardness of growing old, and its inescapable tedium. “If life turns out to be short, well then that’s cruel,” Anna-Maria decides. “But when life is long, that can be cruel too.” Skilful, generous and humane, these 12 tales suggest the complexity and heartbreak of being engaged on such an uncertain journey.
Twelve Post-War Tales by Graham Swift is published by Scribner (£18.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy atguardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.