Book 66 - Graham Swift "Mothering Sunday"
Oct. 4th, 2017 03:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzy_daveGraham Swift "Mothering Sunday" (Scribner)
IT is years,perhaps a decade, since i last read a book from Graham Swift. For some reason he fell off my radar until i spotted this book in a charity shop. Fortuitously, this find has reignited my desire to check out more of his novels,though this one is short enough to be called a novella.
Surprisingly nuanced, this is the story of Jane Fairchild, an orphan-turned-maid servant who is having an affair with the handsome heir in a neighboring English country house. The year is 1924; the First War has ravaged the country and everything is changing fast. But Jane is just a young woman in love with a young man, the two of them from such different spheres that she hardly even grieves the impossibility of their relationship. Swift's tale focuses largely on a single day but he captures a lifetime through the narrative, moving back and forth through Jane's life such that her character emerges in multifaceted light and shadow. That Jane becomes a writer provides an intriguing reflective vehicle for the author to consider truth, fiction, lies and stories as they meld into a novelist's craft. That a writer draws upon their own experience, their own story, is inevitable. So this story about one remarkable day in the life of an ordinary servant girl becomes a meditation on the novelist's material: the "stuff of life," and the novelist's intention: through fiction, through lies, to tell the truth.
IT is years,perhaps a decade, since i last read a book from Graham Swift. For some reason he fell off my radar until i spotted this book in a charity shop. Fortuitously, this find has reignited my desire to check out more of his novels,though this one is short enough to be called a novella.
Surprisingly nuanced, this is the story of Jane Fairchild, an orphan-turned-maid servant who is having an affair with the handsome heir in a neighboring English country house. The year is 1924; the First War has ravaged the country and everything is changing fast. But Jane is just a young woman in love with a young man, the two of them from such different spheres that she hardly even grieves the impossibility of their relationship. Swift's tale focuses largely on a single day but he captures a lifetime through the narrative, moving back and forth through Jane's life such that her character emerges in multifaceted light and shadow. That Jane becomes a writer provides an intriguing reflective vehicle for the author to consider truth, fiction, lies and stories as they meld into a novelist's craft. That a writer draws upon their own experience, their own story, is inevitable. So this story about one remarkable day in the life of an ordinary servant girl becomes a meditation on the novelist's material: the "stuff of life," and the novelist's intention: through fiction, through lies, to tell the truth.
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