England and Other Stories

all the stories depict an important side of England and the English, each short story can be considered as unique as well as linked with the general picture of the book as a whole. It drove me to make some research into English history, some of the stories deal with chapters full of war and the very last episode is like a movie, you can feel the atmosphere of the coastal officer testing his knowledge of the accents of the English regions

Short. Sentences. Small vignettes. Unresolved endings. The authors style is simplistic and the writing is sparse and straightforward. Many of the 25 stories are about sadness, loss or darkness. The characters never really develop. I think his idea was to take mundane everyday thoughts and tasks and to try to look at them in depth, however the search for deeper meaning never appears. I see the author has won book prizes previously, I don't see it here, perhaps his earlier works were more fully developed or complex. Flat.

I normally don't read short stories, but I really enjoyed these. Tremendous deep train of thought writing in the mind of every character. Very "mental" threads. Wished each story had gone on and on with longer plots.

I tried, I truly tried to read the stories, especially in view of the favorable review in The New York Times. I tried, but eventually I just had to flip the pages to get to the last one. Maybe it is just me: but I found the characters of absolutely no interest and the stories boring. Very boring.

Enjoyable short stories

In his Man Booker Prize winning novel,  LAST ORDERS  (1997), Swift followed a quartet of elderly men as they drive out from the East End of London to cast an old friend's ashes into the sea. The point of that quiet, detailed, but slow-moving book is to ask the question of all of them: "What have we become?" As I recall, Swift has few surprising revelations, only the gradual recognition that there can be a rightness, even a kind of beauty, in quite ordinary lives. Now in this collection, Swift once more mines the same vein, offering 25 further occasions for reflection, as rather ordinary characters look back on rather ordinary lives. Individually, I found them quite beautiful, since the eight-to-ten-page length perfectly suits the brief moment of reflection before moving on. So far, I have read rather more than half of them, and will enjoy the rest over the next few weeks. This is a book to savor over time; the stories are rather too similar to be read all at once.The funeral theme recurs several times here. In "Lawrence of Arabia," a widow riding on a bus the day after her husband's funeral sees the headline that Peter O'Toole has died. In "People Are Life," a barber gives a trim to a customer before his wife's funeral. The death in "The Best Days" is that of a former headmaster, but the funeral occasions the private reflections of two old friends about their sexual adventures while at school. And there are several other bereaved people: the septuagenarian in "First on the Scene" who goes on country walks to recapture weekends he enjoyed with his wife finds a body in a woodland clearing; the fiftyish osteopath in "Half a Loaf" rejoices in the sexual kindness of a much younger woman, even though he realizes that the affair will probably not last.But not all the moments of reflection are occasioned by death. "As Much Love as Possible" is about two friends having a men's night in while their wives enjoy a girls' night out; "Wonders Will Never Cease" has a man bringing his wife to stay with a recently married old friend; both stories gently probe the paradoxes of marriage and the little jealousies that can arise between even the closest of friends. In "Going Up in the World," the two friends are older, partners in a window-cleaning firm, but the focus is on the rising careers of their respective sons. This is reversed in "Saving Grace," where British-born Indian doctor examines his relationship with his own father.There are a few exceptions to the general pattern, most notably "Haematology," consisting of a letter from Sir William Harvey, the former Royal Physician to King Charles I, to an old friend in the entourage of Oliver Cromwell. In "England," the title story that ends the collection, a man helps a stranded traveler on an Exmoor road; I am not sure that it works, since the encounter is so bizarre that it detracts from what I think is its main point, which is to have the Samaritan (an off-duty coastguard) reflect on the limitations of his own life. Although the basic situation of "Yorkshire" -- a long-married couple in their seventies -- is similar to that of other stories, this is exceptional in that the triggering event is of quite a different order of seriousness. But my favorite of all is probably "The Best Days," which reverses the pattern of looking back. In it, a recently-married couple visit a solicitor to make their wills. Feeling it like a reaffirmation of their marriage, they return home and make love. Then, while his wife is sleeping, the husband gets up to write her a letter for the future. "The overwhelming thought came to him: Remember this, remember this. Remember this always. Whatever comes, remember this."

Critics have noted that Graham Swift's writing tends towards the sparse; this is certainly the case with ENGLAND AND OTHER STORIES, comprising twenty-five short stories, the majority of which end up as meditations on the protagonists' lives. The style is very reminiscent of Henry James; not a lot happens, but a great deal of time has been devoted to the ways in which characters reflect on their future courses of action in light of the presence and the past.A divorced father of two remembers the time when himself and his young wife went to a lawyer to draw up their wills, and he forgot to give her as love letter ("Remember This"). Another lawyer, told that he has an incurable disease and that he only has a few months to live, reflects on whether to look at his life from a more mindful perspective, or to put the news at the back of his mind and carry on as if nothing had happened. A professor of Greek at an Oxbridge college reflects on his childhood when he lived next to a "weirdo" called Mr. Wilkinson, and the childish act of bringing his neighbor a bottle of drain cleanser ("Ajax") inavertently stimulated the professor's passion for classical mythology"Going Up in the World," set in the bourgeois world of south-east London, has a window-cleaner reflecting on how he has "made it" financially, while his more streetwise friend appears to be slightly disadvantaged; while "Lawrence of Arabia," links a domestic family bereavement to the simultaneous passing of the actor Peter O'Toole, reminding us, perhaps, of how our lives are dictated by popular cultures, however much we like to profess our independence. Another tale "Knife" is written from the perspective of a twelve-year-old boy listening to his mother making love in the next room, and deciding whether or not to take a kitchen-knife from the drawer so as to increase his sense of power. "Half a Loaf" has an osteopath falling in love with one of his patients; an unethical thing to do, perhaps, but something that can happen to everyone.Throughout the collection Swift enters the minds of different speakers, illustrating the moral, social and psychological dilemmas that all of them face. Even the simplest decision can provoke agonies, especially when none of us are aware of the consequences of such decisions might be. We inhabit an indifferent universe; although we have friends and family to help us in bad times, we still have to stand up on our own and try and negotiate our lives as best we can. This is not an easy process, but one that we have to confront. ENGLAND AND OTHER STORIES offers a series of object lessons in how we might undertake this task - through entering the lives of others, of various ages, backgrounds, gender and class, we can organize ourselves.This collection is a prime example of what fiction can do; it can draw us into alternative worlds yet provide us with the kind of ontological insights that enrich our lives.