“Mothering Sunday” by Graham Swift:
A naked man getting slowly dressed.
A naked woman coming down the stairs.
From the very first line, which opens like a fairy tale (once upon a time…), I was captured by the masterly evocation and beautiful phrasing, the musicality of the language and the almost painterly use of emotive prose.
It is the year 1924 and Jane, an orphaned maid who works for the Nivens, an upper-class family, finds herself in the estate of the neighbouring estate of the Sheringhams, also old-money aristocracy. Because it is Mothering Sunday the house is conveniently empty. She is in the bedroom together with the young heir, Paul Sheringham, who has been her lover for years and is going to be married in an arranged marriage to another woman in two weeks time and they both know that this just had been, probably, their last time of intimacy.
Little is said, much is revealed. Not much happens but still a lot does happen.
Mothering Sunday, in adding layer upon layer of revelations and memories over time, builds in complexity. It is more than just a story about crossing barriers like class or education.
It is a book full of sensual, contemplative, long lasting images which carry so much more than what they actually show. Little still lifes, rendered in minute contemplation and an adoration of the transcendence of their everyday banality.
Sounds, outside, in the air, inside the house.
Smells, of fruit, of grass, of body.
Touch, tactile sensations like trickling fluid out of body cavities or bare feet striking cool tiles, of a breeze against skin, of the afterglow of sex.
Objects, who become laden and imbued with meaning and a life of their own, objects who seem to retreat and shrink back with an insistent stillness. Flowers, blooms, frozen like butterflies.
Light on objects, light in rooms, light through windows, tree leaves, across lawns.
Mothering Sunday is sensual, it moves the heart, it is a beautiful and precious gem. In just about 130 pages Graham Swift has rendered a little masterpiece. In its brevity it explores themes and mental landscapes which longer books sometimes cannot cover.
It is an ode to life, to youth, to ageing. It explores identity and the need of the search for a narrative, it tells of the value of experience and the power and doubt of storytelling.
It is a powerful, philosophical and beautiful contemplation of the lives we lead and of the parallel lives we might have lead. As it moves from 1924 through the century it becomes also the story of a self-discovery.
It is a thorough contemplation of life, of what the real stuff in life is, what counts, what is tale, fiction or reality. It is about books and literature, about words and meanings, about chances and missed chances, about finding your place in the world and finding a language with which to speak in it. It is a remarkably wise, life confirming and uplifting book. It gave me much pleasure.
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