Review: 'Mothering Sunday,' by Graham Swift

Booker Prize-winning British novelist Graham Swift is on a brevity kick. Last year he published "England and Other Stories," a nimble collection of short fiction. He has followed this up with "Mothering Sunday," a "romance" that clocks in at under 200 pocket-size pages. Swift, however, accomplishes a great deal in such a tight narrative. This boutique novel is a meditation on and a manifestation of "a complete fiction."

Set in 1924, "Mothering Sunday" is a sort of deeper Downton Abbey. The titular holiday, which in contemporary England has been eclipsed by the American mores of Mother's Day, was an opportunity for servants to spend time with their families. But Swift's central character, maid Jane Fairchild, has no mother to visit, and "sun-bathed, lamb-dotted England" is full of mothers whose sons have never returned from the Great War.

The novel's quiet calculus allows us to see this devastation. Two neighboring genteel families, the Nivens and the Sheringhams, have lost two boys each. Jane works for the Nivens and, on "this special upside-down day," discreetly cycles over to the Sheringhams' middling estate to meet Paul, the one surviving son of either family.

At first glance, Paul and Jane's relationship seems to be the romance of Swift's subtitle, but the upstairs-downstairs power imbalance makes their past and future problematic, to say the least. Jane, who in the course of a long and extraordinary life will never completely lose "her inner curtsey," is sharply aware of class relations — straining, but still in place, in 1924. Here she is with Mr. Niven:

"She knew what he meant. She knew exactly what he meant. But she said, 'Yes, sir,' in the way that maids simply mouth those words in general concurrence with everything."

The otherwise suave Paul has "an explosive cacophonous giggle" that erupts "as if a mould had shattered," but the true mould breaker of the story is Jane. She is hungry for adventure that is not just amorous, but also intellectual and imaginative. In a memorable run of pages, Jane gets up close and personal with Upleigh, the Sheringhams' well-appointed house, once Paul has departed to lunch with his socially appropriate fiancée.

In the country homes of people like the Sherighams and Nivens, "libraries … were like dry, sober rejections of adventure," but Jane has other ideas. On this day that "had blurred the usual order of things," she is beginning to grasp that romance can be "something far off that was also deep inside."

"Mothering Sunday" could be also subtitled "an origin story," as it eloquently accounts for the beginning of a vocation, and the re-beginning of an individual. It can be read in a sitting or two, and could make your day.

Robert Cremins teaches in the Honors College at the University of Houston.

Mothering Sunday
By: Graham Swift.
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, 177 pages, $22.95