Mothering Sunday by Graham Swift, book review: A tale of life and lust

This deceptively short, sexy novel reflects on big themes, striking just the right balance between taste and vulgarity

A story filled with post-coital languor: lovers (Getty Images)

"One's literary life must turn frequently for sustenance to memories and seek discourse with the shades; unless one has made up one's mind to write only in order to reprove mankind for what it is, or praise it for what it is not, or – generally – to teach it how to behave." So wrote Joseph Conrad in A Personal Record. Conrad, like Proust, plundered memory to make him a writer, whether it was the arrest, exile and deaths of his parents, his departure from Poland for France, his joining of the British Merchant Service, his first sight of the East, or any of the adventures from his 20 years at sea. The most vivid events became stepping stones to his fiction, like Wordsworth's "spots of time". They were what he called his "standing jumps".

Graham Swift's Mothering Sunday is about one such defining moment. It is set in 1924, the year of Conrad's death, and its housemaid heroine, Jane Fairchild, reads the news of his passing in the morning paper before putting it on her master's breakfast table. Jane, plain Jane, that good Brontë name, is 22 years old, an orphan and an outsider, but not so plain as to be unattractive to the neighbouring posh boy: Paul Sheringham. Already engaged to a necessarily wealthy gal of similar social standing, Paul is keen to go downstairs and take Jane out for as much rumpy-pumpy while he can, sewing his wild oats in the stables, the greenhouse, the potting shed and the shrubbery. Gentleman that he is, he even organises the contraception, a Dutch cap, to prevent the unnecessary.

Mothering Sunday, 30 March 1924, offers the chance of full consummation in his own bed. It's Jane's day off, Paul's parents are out of the house and shortly after 11am she's through the front door, up the stairs and all clothes are off. The action itself, like the novel, is brief, but the atmosphere around it is contemplative and the impact resonant and long lasting; in fact, a far simpler way of describing this book would be to say that it is like Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach, only with better sex.

It is all carefully done with that modish collision of taste and vulgarity. For just as Alan Hollinghurst can compare an erect penis to a piece of antique furniture, or Colm Tóibín seems to like an obscure bit of Bizet or Beethoven as background to buggery, so Graham Swift spends a great deal of time describing the dressing table, the silver-framed photographs, the bowls of white flowers and a few sexually suggestive orchids before getting down to the nitty gritty. This is to let the reader know that this is serious writing rather than anything as grubby as porn or, even worse, E.L. James. And so, after several lyrically Swiftian passages, Jane smokes a cigarette and then "just brushed his moist cock, feeling it stir almost instantly, like some sleeping nestling before bicycling away with "the air up her skirt and a Dutch cap up her fanny". I am not sure this is entirely successful, and it may involve the reader never looking at sleeping nestlings in the same way again.

The principal tone of the novel is, however, one of post-coital languor. Time slows and there are moments that could be described as Proustian or perhaps, more accurately, as reminiscent of Edward Thomas's great poem "Adlestrop". Here is Jane stopping on her bicycle on her way home to listen to the day passing: "There was not a murmur, in any direction, of traffic. There was only the birdsong and, in the warm air, the half-heard stirring and rousing of – everything. Spring." This moment of stillness is symptomatic of the book's determined lyricism. Swift is an undoubted master of detail and delay, working by a process of meditation and accumulation to create a narrative that carries far more heft than one might assume from its length.

Mothering Sunday is only 132 pages long and, to be honest, there is more to it than a quick shag before lunch. Paul announces that he has to leave and meet his fiancée, and so the full day together that Jane was hoping for is curtailed; although she is permitted to stay after he has gone, wander round the house naked (like the girl in Lindsay Anderson's film If... pondering the equally unfamiliar surroundings of a public school dormitory), and eat the veal and ham pie that cook has left. This Jane does, reflecting all the while on whether any of this amorous activity has meant anything. As she drifts into a slow and lazy reverie, Paul sets off at top speed down the neighbouring country lanes in his new fast car and the inevitable occurs, with death as familiar as any Edwardian novel that ends in 1913 or the finale of the first series of Downton.

So, la petite mort, and then simply la mort. This may seem a spoiler but it is not. Swift tells us fairly early on that Paul will die. What matters is more style and impression than content: the persistence of memory and the ensuing feeling of dissociation that rises in Jane Fairchild. This is a sensation that most writers share, the dream-like mixture of recall and reality that invites us on the almost interminably frustrating mental journey to make sense of life.

Consequently, Jane starts to spend more and more time thinking and, indeed, reading, starting with Conrad's Youth, and this sets her on her way, finally and in much later life, to become a well-known author, the recipient of frequently asked questions at literary festivals at which she suppresses the story we are now being told.

Mothering Sunday is, therefore, a Conradian homage to a well-spring of inspiration, and employs several of the great writer's techniques to do so (indirect narration, disrupted chronology, a distinct sense of otherness, the preference to end a novel with a dying fall rather than a dramatic finale). Conrad believed that it was "better for mankind to be impressionable rather than reflective" and Swift agrees, observing that the purpose of fiction "was about trying to capture, though you never could, the very feeling of being alive. It was about finding a language." You can hear his master's voice echoing through the pages of this deceptively fine novel: "Give me the right word and the right accent and I will move the world."

Scribner, £12.99. Order at the discounted price of £10.99 inc. p&p from the Independent Bookshop