You’ll never look at dried pasta in the same way again

A calculated ordinariness unites the protagonists in Graham Swift’s new collection of short stories. In each of these mini fictions, as in his novels, Swift revisits his conceit of the narrator as man (or woman) on the Clapham omnibus. Invariably he endows these blank ciphers with aspects of the extraordinary — percipience, insight or understanding — or exposes them to feelings and events which place them in extraordinary positions and offer them opportunities to behave remarkably while remaining apparently run of the mill. Swift revels in the trappings of Pooterishness while denying his protagonists Mr Pooter’s silliness. His vision may be contrived but it never patronises. The experience of these stories rescues Swift’s ‘ordinary’ men and women from stereotype, a moral in itself.

That Swift should have titled the present collection England and Other Stories is, of course, significant. He has frequently been labelled a very ‘English’ writer. This is partly on account of his characters’ concern to place themselves within historical narratives — national, local or personal — and thus embrace a long continuum of a certain sort of Englishness. Several of these stories, like ‘Saving Grace’, in which the Battersea-born Dr Shah offers us his family history as a well-practised performance, reflect on ideas of nationality or place. Mostly the stories’ ‘Englishness’ is of a less concrete nature, a bittersweet quality that distinguishes much ‘English’ art and writing, a sense of loss that is nearly pleasurable. ‘We reach our peaks and pass them,’ comments the narrator of ‘Wonders Will Never Cease’: ‘There’s nothing to be done about it, but it’s a sad thing if you never even knew the peak you had it in you to reach.’ ‘Remember this, remember this, remember this always. Whatever comes, remember this,’ intones Nick in the aptly titled ‘Remember This’. That injunction might serve for all Swift’s protagonists.