Mothering Sunday

Jon Snow is a voice that we all trust. Whether he is discussing the Syrian conflict or dancing to pop songs on The Big Fat Quiz of the Year, he is always appears a decent egg. So while listening to him give his book recommendation on Radio 4’s A Good Read my ear’s piqued: what is good enough for Jon Snow is good enough for me, I thought. His choice was Graham Swift’s Mothering Sunday, a novella he describes as ‘a very short book, but very long on emotion, romance and beauty.’ 

The people's newsreader.

The only other liaison I've enjoyed with Swift was when I read his Booker winning novel Last Orders, a naturalistic portrait of the days following death. That book set in contemporary London followed a group of working-class men coming together to carry out the last request of a deceased friend. For many winning a major Arts prize is the apex of a one’s career, but in Sunday Swift has crafted a miniature of such finesse and detail that the observant eye may perhaps view it as more impressive than his supposed ‘masterpiece.’

Last Orders was later turned into a film starring Michael Caine and Bob Hoskins.

Mothering Sunday is set on the titular date in 1924. It tells the story of a maid Jane Fairchild and her affair with wealthy landowner Paul Sheringham. Now at this point, I appreciate many of you are retching into your cliché bucket. This love across the classes is a story as old as time, lapped up by Sunday audiences since God had a rest. I too had my reservations about the premise, but despite the rather hackneyed plot the execution is anything but, proving as it does to be unutterably intoxicating and incredibly beguiling.

The novella is redolent of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway in that it takes place over one day after the First World War. In Woolf’s modernist novel she experimented with stream of consciousness, a form that attempts to solidify the vaporous thoughts of a character by putting them on the page. As we don’t think in straight lines, this form of narrative is jumbled with visions of the past intruding on the present. Stories like this are satisfying for some and frustrating for others: there is delayed gratification in a story that doesn’t hurtle towards its ending; the reader must surrender to the nebulous world of interior thought, accepting the external world of galloping action is something for other novels. Much of Mothering Sunday then slides in and out of time, making you wonder how on earth the writer knew where they were with the timeline. A case in point is the start of the story: we’re in Sheringham’s room, he and Jane are in glorious wonderland, feeding on the fruits of their clandestine lovemaking. We’re then transported back to before this union happened, only to be ushered back into the bedroom, before again being displaced to hear more of how their affair came to be. This toing and froing would be jolting in the wrong hands, but in Swift's the narrative sways as naturally as the tides.

The book that perhaps inspired Swift.

Snow is also right to call the language ‘deeply poetic’ and remark on how special it is. Sheringham’s love for Jane is duplicitous in that he is betrothed to Miss Hobday, a lady from another rich family; however, the pain in this forced arrangement is made more acute by the instinctive tenderness he feels towards his true love. Coming down from the ecstasy of carnality, the two are described as lying together like ‘pink salmon on a sideboard, waiting for guests, guests at a wedding even, who would never arrive.’ Later, Jane theorises on the satisfaction of sexual pleasure: 

It was called ‘relaxation,’ she thought, a word that did not commonly enter a maid’s vocabulary. She had many words, by now, that did not enter a maid’s vocabulary. Even the word ‘vocabulary.’ She gathered them up like one of those nest-building birds.

This utterance deals with the novel's twin concerns: the power of love and language. Over the course of the novella, Jane learns that the former subjugates the latter, that true kinship between people can never be captured in words- it’s impossible like casting your rod to heaven and being disappointed when you can't catch a cloud.

A lady in the nuddy.

Like Romeo and Juliet, the lovers are never meant to be. Status and tradition are the ruling party, with democratic love pushed to the fringes. The nakedness of the bedroom allows the two be unclothed of the positions that define them. But outside the vultures of conformity hover, reminding the pair that boundless passion will be landlocked by class for many years yet. Tragedy is just a front door away, which is why we our unease grows when one finally has to step outside.

At 132 pages Mothering Sunday is a quick read but a great one. So today on Father's Day why not order yourself a copy? It's what Jon Snow would do.

Mothering Sunday is available now.