Graham Swift is a writer intrigued by pretty well anything of human interest and mystery. Born in postwar Lewisham — a part of south London that had suffered some of the city’s worst damage during the Blitz — with Jewish-Russian ancestry, he remains deep down a London novelist, open to the polyglot variety and wonder of life in the great metropolis. Waterland, the novel that made his name four decades ago, was set partly in Greenwich south of the Thames. Last Orders, the novel for which he won the 1996 Booker Prize, follows a cast of London war veterans on a long walk from Bermondsey to Margate, to scatter their friend’s ashes.
Twelve Post-War Tales, Swift’s third short-story collection, finds a lugubrious comedy in ageing and cognitive decline as characters reflect variously on their past lives in the boondocks of Crystal Palace, Walthamstow, London Docklands and elsewhere. Typically, Swift finds his way into the minds and hearts of an impressive range of personalities.
In “Palace”, an insecure, royalty-hating leftist father swears that the Victorian-era Crystal Palace burned down in 1936 at the hands of Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirts. “I had come to see that my father lived in a world of all-pervasive conspiracy,” his son concludes ruefully. A kind of security nevertheless lies behind his father’s temperamental insecurity: distrusting the intentions of everyone arms him against the possibility of further disappointments and betrayals in life.
In “Blushes”, another bravura performance, a 72-year-old respiratory disease specialist reflects on the day he caught scarlet fever as a child. The memory comes back to him “rushingly fresh” while he drives to hospital one day during the Covid-19 pandemic. Many of the stories are shadowed by cataclysm. The Cuban missile crisis of 1962 provides the backdrop to “Fireworks”, while the Blitz flickers behind “Passport”, in which an octogenarian woman reflects on her Spanish-born mother’s death in one of Hitler’s London bomb attacks.
Swift is a master of dialogue who delights in the possibilities of the human voice. “Chocolate”, a word-perfect story, conjures the joshing repartee of a bunch of pub regulars as they reminisce about a “very sweet” woman who once worked in confectionery. (It also bears similarities to the world of boozy male camaraderie that Swift summoned in Last Orders.) Not all the collection is jocose by any means. Hitler’s war against European Jewry is the subject of “The Next Best Thing”, one of the finest stories here. A young Jewish serviceman from north London arrives in Germany in 1959 in order to determine the fate of one of his relatives. He confronts a creepily over-polite functionary who pointedly avoids the use of the word “Jew”.
The collection is tinged with an autumnal sense of loss and the self-examination of an older writer — Swift is now 75 — looking back on his life. His archly modulated, precise prose, reminiscent at times of his friend Kazuo Ishiguro’s, has lost none of its power. Just occasionally a description stumbles (“horn-rimmed harridan” is too pat) but, overall, this is immensely readable, late-career Swift; from start to finish, Twelve Post-War Tales is a marvel of the storyteller’s art.
Twelve Post-War Tales by Graham Swift Scribner £18.99/Knopf $30, 304 pages
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