"England and other stories" by Graham Swift (Scribner, 2015)

The shortest piece is about 5 pages long. The longest is about 15. There's often little action, and the storytime duration may only be minutes. Backstory and musing dominate, the main characters being thoughtful and analytical. Many of the stories involve men (usually 2) who've been friends for a long while. Widowers and people whose father died early populate the book. A few male+female couples also feature. There are stories about people who survived WW1 and/or WW2, which adds to the book's old-fashioned feel. He likes to associate a place or a minor, arbitrary object with a significant event - "He could hardly enter Waitrose again. It was almost impossible to go now - though he had to - to the spot, in the aisle, where it happened" (p.207), "He'd remember always that slice of bread" (p.241).

Much of the language is half-heartedly demotic. E.g.

• Well, it may put me in a bad light, but I have to say Wanda was a disappointment. Don't get me wrong. I don't mean she wasn't perfectly - fine ... Wanda was nothing special (p.17)

• "Haematology" is a letter dated 1647. There's the occasional archaism ("deign", "nay") but the effect is slight.
• "The best days" is one of several 3rd-person pieces where the narrational language is sometimes similar to that which the main character uses and at other times clearly not - It was hard to to conclude that they'd conspired over it, even gone shopping together. If not, who had started the competition, who had copied whom?" (p.63). I liked the final page of that story.
• In "Knife" the main character (he's 12) hears his mother noisily making love with Wes

  Outside, there were noises too, the noises of kids playing. Just kids playing, kids younger than him, cackling and screeching. Both the noises inside and the noises outside were like the sounds of animals. (p.181)

  which is good. After his mother collected him from the police station

  she'd beaten him - hard, with the full swing of her arm and the full whack of her hand. It was an attack. It hurt. But he'd known she was only hitting him because she was incapable of finding the right words, she might as well have been hitting herself. She was hitting him because in some way she was afraid. (p.181)

  which sounds too sophisticated for a gangster boy like him.

Too many pieces have too little impact - understated moments of realisation where the characters' voices are muffled by that of the narrator. We don't get inside the characters. In "Articles of war" Richard Longridge" is about to join the Temeraire. It's September 1805. On the last page there's

But he had not known action. He knew about noise and smoke and hissing steam that became as great as the smoke. He knew about powder in the mouth and nostrils. But he did not know about splinters. He trusted that, should the occasion arise and they were flying about, he would not lose his power of command. He would not lose his voice. He would not flinch or duck or wish to cover his face, not just because this would be unexemplary, but because he had been led to understand that whatever you did it made no difference (p.236)

which isn't enough for me. Some of the longer pieces (e.g. "Half a Loaf") seem amongst the lightest. "Saving Grace" is weak. "Remember This" and "I live alone" remind me of Julian Barnes' work on an off day. "I live alone" (where the main character receives a terminal diagnosis) has much that sounds convincing, but other parts seem tonally inappropriate - "Dry leaves scurried along the pavement like small alarmed animals" (p.222). I liked "Ajax" and its the slow reveal. Whereas in other stories the narrator's fluency and interest in words doesn't match the main character, in this piece the child appropriately ends up as an Oxbridge classics professor.

The final (title) story is much the best - it deserves to be in annual anthologies. A coastguard on his way to a 5.30am start passes a stopped car in the middle of nowhere. The driver is "other" in several ways - a Northerner of Caribbean decent on the way to a gig, a verbally disorganised comedian who'd had an encounter with a baby deer. The two share a few moments. I like the situation, the voice of the comedian, and the contrast between the 2 men, the coastguard's feelings about Exmoor and England. The balance of action and thought is more to my liking, and the symbolism works better - towards the end "The familiar tower of the lighthouse appeared before him, its topmost, no longer functioning section nonetheless touched with pink glinting light".

Other reviews

• M John Harrison (This is a sharp, beautiful collection: every story quick and readable but leaving in the memory a core, a residue, of thoughtfulness. Some are wicked, some are funny; others, such as "Was She the Only One" or "Fusilli", encapsulate a huge but numbly personal crisis; some manage all three at once. Some feel old-fashioned ... There are a few duds, but Swift's practice – which is to make a world in a dozen pages, sometimes less; a world in a bottle – carries the reader quickly through and on to the next. His touch is so light and craftsmanlike, his scene shifts so subtle, his emotional logic so incontrovertible, that sometimes we hardly notice where they have taken us until too late.)
• Lucy Scholes (Over 25 stories he reduces his characters' lives to these snapshots; a freeze-frame suspended image of a moment that distils the essence of the life in question, reduces it to something small and, to an unknowing observer, seemingly inconsequential.)
• Valerie Martin (Some are very slight, barely sketches, bits of conversation or ­reflection caught in passing; they slip by as strangers do in a populous, busy world, or as ­doodles on the margins of a ­narrative. Others are more complex and deeply engaging. These stories exemplify the ­pastry-chef theory of realism in ­fiction, which holds that reality is a pie; you can slice it. In each slice is the essence of pie. Pie has no plot, but it has character, and that’s what you get. And that’s all you get. ... So in these stories we have a host of characters discovered at vulnerable moments in their lives. ... There’s something bright and rewarding about this tendency to consider both the connotation and the denotation of words as they appear in random thoughts. And it is this that I take, though it isn’t on my list, to be a prime signifier of Englishness.)
• Michiko Kakutani (The lesser stories in this book are more synthetic affairs. ... Had such entries been left on the cutting room floor, “England” would have been a pensive, virtuosic collection. As it stands, it’s a lovely tapestry of stories with some unfortunate unraveled threads.)
• Emily Donaldson (the twenty-five tales in this book, many of them mere wisps of things, are intended as a kind of collective human snapshot of the author’s native land ... Some of the most successful stories are scaffolded on the notion of the frozen moment.)

"Learning to Swim and Other Stories" by Graham Swift (Picador, 1994)

This was first published in 1982 by London Magazine, who had already published some of the stories. Separated parents and dead parents are common themes, along with one parent having an affair that the other knows about. In "Seraglio" a childless couple return early from an Istanbul holiday because of an incident. The first-person male is calculatingly wordy. "The Tunnel" features a young couple trying to evade the girl's rich parents, holed up in a condemned London tower block. It has another thoughtful narrator. The plot too is carefully structured. The main character, confined to his flat, paints Gauguins on the walls, looks down at the school opposite which is due for demolition. He sees ex-schoolboys break in. They return each day to build an escape tunnel, propping it up with broken desks. God-like from his high vantage point he can see the schoolyard and the outside world that their tunnel's aiming for. On the day that he saw a hatch of grass raised outside the school by the diggers, the girl receives a letter about an inheritance.

"Hoffmeier's Antelope" ended tamely.

"The Watch" is a "curse of immortality" story in which an ageless man witnesses a birth with the cold-blooded objectivity common to this book's narrators

those expanding eyes or mine saw a glistening, wet, purple-mottled object, like some wrinkled marble pebble, appear where the split began. This pebble grew - and grew - growing impossibly large for the narrow opening in which it seemed intent on jamming itself. For a whole minute, indeed, it stuck there, as if this were its final resting place, while the mother screamed. And then suddenly it ceased to be a pebble. It was a lump of clenched, unformed flesh, suffused with blood, aware that its position was critical. The mother gasped; it became a head, a gnarled, battered Punch-and-Judy head. The mother gasped again, this time with an audible relief and exultation; and it was no longer a head, but a whole creature, with arms and legs and little groping hands; and it was no longer caught in that awesome constriction but suddenly spilling out with slippery ease, like something poured from a pickle jar (p.109)

In "Chemistry" a widower lives with his single-parent daughter. Conveniently for the plot, Grandpa does chemistry experiments in the shed. The grandson surprises him

"What are you making, Grandpa?" "Not making - changing. Chemistry is the science of change. You don't make things in chemistry - you change them. Anything can change." (p.126)

In the title story, Mrs Singleton sunbathes while watching Mr Singleton teaching their son, Paul (6), to swim in the sea. They're on holiday in Cornwall. She thinks about her unhappy marriage. Three times she's thought of leaving her husband because he's a boring engineer. They have sex monthly. The PoV switches to Mr Singleton - we're less close to him than we were to her. He's thought of leaving her because of her artistic pretentions. He was a good swimmer at 17, but his boring father told him to stop because training was getting in the way of exams. "He was distrustful of happiness as some people fear heights or open spaces."

Their relation is full of tactics - "She knew he only did it to hurt her, and so to feel guilty, and so to feel the remorse which would release his own affection for her, his vulnerability, his own need to be loved ...". "When Mrs Singleton became pregnant she felt she had outmanoeuvred her husband". She had erotic thoughts about her son ("He would become an artist, a sculptor. She would pose for him naked ... Mrs Singleton thought: All the best statues they had seen in Greece seemed to have been dredged up from the sea").

When she thinks Paul has got the hang of swimming she rushes to the water (flirtily to irritate her husband) and offers Paul an ice-cream. At the end it's Paul's PoV. He's scared of water - "If you do not swim you sank like a statue" (n.b. not like a stone). At the end "he kicked and struck, half in panic, half in pride, away from his father, away from the shore, away, in this strange new element that seemed all his own"". I like the ingredients but it's heavy-handed in too many places.

Other reviews

• Barry J. Fishman ( The collection was very well received in England, where Swift, though young, is already established as one of England's leading writers. In America, however, Learning to Swim received a much less favorable reception than did Waterland (published here in 1985), and in the words of Contemporary Authors (V.122) "more than one critic remarked that some of the tales seemed too studied and even uncompelling.")
• Alberto Piñera
• Michael Gorra (New York Times)