Speak, memory

Not all readers are beholden to the first line of a novel, I admit, but to those of us who are, well begun really is half done. Anthony Burgess was a master in this regard; his first lines were disorienting sucker punches. Gabriel Garcia Marquez was another writer who invested a lot in the perfect opening. He once told Plinio Mendoza that it took him more time to compose the first sentence than the rest of the book put together. After all, the first sentence could be “the laboratory for testing the style, the structure and even the length of the book”. With his latest novel, Mothering Sunday , Graham Swift has surely composed one of the greatest opening lines in contemporary fiction, a languid, layered sentence that is more synecdoche than stage-setter.

“Once upon a time, before the boys were killed and when there were more horses than cars, before the male servants disappeared and they made do, at Upleigh and at Beechwood, with just a cook and a maid, the Sheringhams had owned not just four horses in their own stable, but what might be called a ‘real horse’, a racehorse, a thoroughbred.”

This sentence does a perfect job of anchoring us in space and time. It also tells the reader that the relationship between the gentry and their servants is central to the narrative. For a certain class of people (not restricted to England), origins are everything, whether it’s horses or humans under scrutiny. The other bits in this line: proprietary notions, cars and dead boys, are all examples of Shakespearean foreshadowing.

The ‘real time’ events of the story happen on March 30, 1924, a Sunday, the titular Mothering Sunday, a time for sharing pies and stories with the materfamilias. Our protagonist, Jane Fairchild, is an orphan who has been domestic help at the Nivens for a long time (‘Jane Fairchild’ is a bit like saying ‘John Doe’, with some post-war optimism thrown in). The Nivens have lost all their children (all boys) to the Great War, and hence adore young Paul Sheringham, the only surviving son of their friends, to a fault. What they don’t know is that Jane and Sheringham have been sleeping together for years. At first, Jane would accept money or presents. Now the business part of it has been erased by pleasure.

Like some of the best short novels (think On Chesil Beach or The Testament of Mary ) Mothering Sunday is propelled not by its plot — although this is by no means a plotless book — but by the atmosphere it constructs meticulously, page by page. We see the effect that the war has had on the affluent classes. Their treasures have been depleted, their sons wounded or killed. The sense of complacency they had, sitting in their green suburbs and villages, has been shattered. In the face of arbitrary and incomprehensible tragedy, people tend to cling to the familiar. This is what happens with Mr Niven, Jane’s employer. In his quaint insistence on official labelling — he calls the two bicycles in the house First Bicycle and Second Bicycle — we see a clueless, essentially good-hearted soul clutching at straws, trying to con himself into believing he is still living in an innocent world.

Every now and then, we meet the present-day Jane Fairchild, nonagenarian novelist and revered intellectual, looking back upon her days in Oxford and the events of Mothering Sunday, 1924. We learn that Jane’s fascination with Mr Niven’s bookshelves led to an apprenticeship at a bookstore in Oxford, which in turn led to an academic career at the university. In the hands of an inferior writer, all this would have looked a wee bit forced. But Swift wields the conductor’s baton expertly. In Jane’s insistence on taking multiple lovers “but not friends” at Oxford, in her fascination with the works of Joseph Conrad (like her, a self-taught writer), her careful guarding of her past with Sheringham, we see the calculating, calibrated persona of the modern-day writer.

Jane’s progress also makes a statement about subaltern literature. It’s true that her early education comes about as a direct result of Mr Niven’s indulgence and his resources. But she is careful not to reveal the extent of her erudition to her employer. It can be said that she used the resources of the dominant to reverse said dominance.

I felt that, on the whole, Mothering Sunday worked as a period piece, but it did particularly well as an allegory for the writing process; the summoning of memory (like the name of Vladimir Nabokov’s memoir, Speak, Memory ), the framing of the narrative, introducing the characters, the central conflict and the resolution: Jane’s hopscotch jumps from past to present to future ultimately follow this pattern.

It is quite possible to gobble up Mothering Sunday in a single, languorous afternoon. But if you do, a laborious re-read is recommended. There are jewel-like sentences here, and their lustre only grows with successive reads.

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