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The Guardian
4 days ago
- Health
- The Guardian
Twelve Post-War Tales by Graham Swift review – haunting visions from a Booker winner
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: But she couldn't have thought, then, what her 49-year-old self could think: that 90 years was the length of a decent human life, though rather longer, as it had proved, than her father's. And she surely couldn't have thought then, as she thought now, that there were two things, generally made of wood, specifically designed to accommodate the dimensions of a single human being. Two objects of carpentry. A door and a coffin. It was like the answer to a riddle. 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 at Delivery charges may apply.
The Sun
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Sun
Sarah Beeney's ‘illegal Downton Abbey' farmhouse she built on TV show in new council row as she faces demolishing it
SARAH Beeny is said to be having a showdown meeting with council enforcement officials. The 53-year-old television star is facing a new investigation and row as officials are poised to visit the site. 5 5 5 5 This comes after she was ordered to demolish a major part of her 'mini Downtown Abbey', which featured in her hit telly show New Life in the Country. The presenter agreed with Somerset Council to knock down a 1970s farmhouse, but - without planning permission - went ahead with extending the building instead. When she applied for retrospective permission, she was refused and also lost her appeal in March. There is currently a live enforcement notice for the farmhouse to be razed to the ground, but it could yet be saved by an unlikely source… roosting bats. They've been found in the dwelling and now there's set to be a meeting at the property between Sarah, husband Graham Swift and the council's enforcement and ecology teams. A Somerset Council spokesperson said: "We are due to arrange a joint site meeting with Enforcement and Ecology Teams and the owners of the property to confirm the route forward following the recent appeal decision. "We are also working with an ecologist with the appropriate licences to assist us as a result of a bat roost being found in the original dwelling to ensure we can be clear in terms of what mitigation would be required and acceptable." The Sun reached out to Sarah's representative for comment, but they did not immediately respond. Sarah has been in a bitter six-year fight with local residents and the council to completely overhaul her rural estate in Stoney Stoke, Somerset, which she bought for £3M in 2018. She put in a raft of planning applications and in one local compared her to Captain Tom's daughter. Hannah Ingram-Moore built an illegal spa complex at her house in Marston Moretaine, Bedfordshire, claiming it was partly being used by her late father's charity, but the council ordered her to tear it down. Neighbour Kevin Flint said: 'It's created a lot of bad feeling in the village. 'She was given permission to build the new house on condition she knocked down the old one which she extended and refurbished, it's just not on. 'She thinks she can move down here and ride roughshod over everybody but it's not going to happen. 'I think the fair thing would be for anything unauthorised on the site to be demolished like Captain Tom's daughter. Sarah's New Life in the Country Channel 4 series has been charting her extensive renovations. She had previously asked to build a completely new home - this was granted as long as the old home and its outbuildings were completely demolished. She went ahead and built the new dwelling, yet didn't get rid of the old farmhouse, and extended it, adding new French doors and a first floor balcony. Earlier this year, she scrapped plans to turn two barns into four new homes after a furious row with locals. Half a dozen locals objected to the proposed development and said she had "blatantly ignored" an enforcement notice ordering her to remove earth banks built without planning permission. 5
Wall Street Journal
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
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.
