Fiction: ‘Twelve Post-War Tales' by Graham Swift
Graham Swift offers the title of his third collection of short stories, 'Twelve Post-War Tales,' in an egalitarian spirit. The characters include ex-soldiers and war orphans but also teachers, miners, maids and other working-class Britons who know of battlefields only from textbooks and newsreels. Even these civilians, suggests Mr. Swift, have been shaped by war's carnage. Everyone lives in a postwar world.
The stories layer small, private dramas over what a character calls 'the big events of history.' In 'Fireworks' a father debates whether to postpone his daughter's wedding after the outbreak of the Cuban Missile Crisis. 'Zoo' takes place on Sept. 11, 2001, but dwells less on the terrorist attacks than on the quotidian duties of a London housekeeper and nanny. 'Where were you when?' she knows people will ask her. At the monkey exhibition explaining the facts of life to her employer's young son.
A long shadow of grief looms over the tales, no matter their distance from war. 'Beauty' is a wonderful story—both heartbreaking and generous—about a bereft old man's visit to the college dorm room where his granddaughter died by suicide. In 'Hinges' a brother and sister are tongue-tied as they try to describe their father to the minister who will eulogize him. 'They didn't know what to say about their father whom they'd known all their lives. They were curiously at a loss. At a loss. Exactly.'
Loss is an imaginative wellspring for this author, whose fiction includes the 1996 Booker Prize-winner, 'Last Orders,' which relates the journey of three World War II veterans to scatter a friend's ashes. Mr. Swift's writing is fluent and colloquial. The characters in this collection share their thoughts and memories with the reader as though with a close friend, and the warmth of their confidences balances against their sadness. We feel we've been in the trenches with them, even when a story has gone no farther than the living room.
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