LITERARY FICTION
MOTHERING SUNDAY
by Graham Swift
(Scribner £12.99) IT’S March 30, 1924 — Mothering Sunday, the day domestic servants were traditionally given off to go home to visit their mothers with a card and a bunch of flowers.
However, Jane Fairchild, a young maid and an orphan, does not follow this pattern; her Sunday off instead involves a trip to a neighbour’s house and a morning of secretive sex with Paul, the dashing son of her employers’ friends.
After the sex, Jane will walk around the empty house naked and, in the longer term, she will go on to have a very full life and a great career as a writer.
As for her lover, he will dash off to meet his wealthy fiancee for lunch, but there will be no longer term and indeed no lunch . . .
Love and death and much in between are expertly handled in this short but powerful novella. WHEN THE FLOODS CAME
by Clare Morrall
(Sceptre £17.99) SET your time machine for later this century and 20 years after the apocalypse has come to Britain. Confusingly, the cause of the British Armageddon was not the floods of the novel’s title but a virus that killed almost everyone and made the few survivors infertile.
Now, Britain is still quarantined from the rest of the world and is almost entirely uninhabited.
Almost, but not quite, and among the survivors is the Polanski family, who live in a tower block on the edge of a deserted Birmingham.
They have online contact with the outside world but have met nobody else. Then one day a stranger turns up and tempts them out to a fair at what used to be football club Coventry City’s stadium.
But can the Polanskis trust this man? After all, they possess that rarest of treasures — a young child.
I do have a few footling quibbles about the plot, but let’s ignore them and focus instead on the superbly imagined and horribly convincing vision of an emptied Britain, of tree-filled buildings and mosscovered motorways.
A wonderful book by a terrific writer. I AM NO ONE
by Patrick Flanery (Atlantic £14.99) JEREMY O’KEEFE is an American history professor who has returned to New York after a ten-year exile in Oxford.
He feels lonely but also seems to have company, because there is a man in a balaclava who appears to be keeping watch on him.
Jeremy starts to receive boxes containing thousands of pages of documents — his entire internet history and a record of all his phone calls . . .
This is not just Jeremy’s paranoia, they really are out to get him — whoever they might be.
This very contemporary tale of surveillance and privacy is told by the professor himself, and he does have an authentically professorial way of banging on and on.
However, while these meandering reflections and recollections are often very interesting, I could not help but think they really put the brakes on what could have been a properly zippy plot, and too often slowed it to a plod through the verbiage.