Mothering Sunday by Graham Swift (2016)

A maid in a wealthy English family meditates on her affair with a young heir, on story telling, and on the rich store of the world around her, "once upon a time." 

Book Review: Mothering Sunday is the first I've read by Graham Swift (where has he been? where have I been?), but I don't think it'll be the last. This book, a novella, reminds me a little of Virginia Woolf and Muriel Spark, both masters of short novels. Within these few pages set in 1924, Swift encompasses the damage wrought by the First World War, the extent and decline of the British class system, women's place in society, the importance of reading, despair, ambition, writing, story telling, how lives become fiction; it begins, "Once upon a time." Written in a dreamy, poetic language but with an undercurrent of tension and anticipation, we float through thoughts barely touched by what is. And since Mothering Sunday is subtitled "A Romance," there are a few thoughts, too, about love. In a swirling narrative that plays with time, lying in bed after a tryst with the engaged and only remaining son of an upper class family, our lowly servant and story teller looks at her life before and ahead, wonders what might have been, what could be, what was. The writer she'll become is still distant, but already part of her, her thoughts clearly show the writer to be. In her lover's silence, she imagines what "another man, in another story, might be saying." She ponders that if his fiancee had interrupted them "then there might have been a scene, a wild and frantic scene. And the day would have turned out very differently." In her thoughts we see the fruits of her almost taboo reading of boys' adventure stories, her almost secret self-education, and her nascent writer's mind despite the limits of her social standing. Her thoughts slowly whirl through possibilities. She thinks of "All the scenes. To imagine them was only to imagine the possible, even to predict the actual. But it was also to conjure the non-existent." On this morning, after making love, was "when she really became a writer," when her lover leaves to meet his fiancee, leaving her alone in his family's mansion to wander naked through the rooms, breaking social mores, the social mores her ambition would break to become a writer: "It was what she would have to do to become a writer: cross an impossible barrier." Being free to cross barriers, to ignore social norms, would enable her to become a different person, no longer in service, a person that wouldn't just read books, but could write them. Mothering Sunday also shows the decimation and fundamental loss caused by the Great War, which helps lead to the decline of the young heir and his upper class family. And the subsequent ambition and rise of those below, in particular our young servant, soon to be no longer as limited by sex and education. This is modernist writing in service to historical fiction. I was surprised at how stimulating this book was, as in exploring the maid's mind Graham Swift raised even more thoughts in mine. Mothering Sunday is a quick and excellent read, philosophical and enjoyable. [4 Stars]