Twelve Post-War Tales by Graham Swift review – haunting visions from a Booker winner

The author’s conceptual agility is on display in these short stories surveying the trauma of conflict and the challenges of survivalThere are several wars, not all of them military ones, in these deftly turned stories from Booker winner Graham Swift. With characteristic exactness and compassion, Swift considers the cost of human conflict in all its forms – and the challenge, for those who manage to stay alive, of retrieving the past.In The Next Best Thing former Leutnant Büchner, gatekeeping civic records in postwar Germany in 1959, fields a British serviceman’s attempts to trace the fate of his German Jewish relatives during the Holocaust. Denial and guilt vie chillingly in a tale about the agony of looking back when there are only “pathetic little scraps of paper” to be found. “What did they expect, after all, what did they really hope for,” Büchner wonders, “these needy and haunted ones who still, after 15 years, kept coming forward … To be given back the actual ashes, the actual dust, the actual bones?”But she couldn’t have thought, then, what her 49-year-old self could think: that 90 years was the length of a decent human life, though rather longer, as it had proved, than her father’s. And she surely couldn’t have thought then, as she thought now, that there were two things, generally made of wood, specifically designed to accommodate the dimensions of a single human being. Two objects of carpentry. A door and a coffin. It was like the answer to a riddle. Continue reading...

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