In the most arresting story in this new collection, a young boy offers a tin of Ajax to the next-door neighbour, who's come looking for a helping hand unblocking his drains. "Isn't it a sad thing, Jimmy," the man laments, "that one of the great heroes of the Greek myths, one of the most glorious of those who fought in the Trojan war, should be reduced to being a tin of scouring powder?"
Reduction in all its forms is something of a theme in Graham Swift's collection, both in form and content. Over 25 stories he reduces his characters' lives to these snapshots; a freeze-frame suspended image of a moment that distils the essence of the life in question, reduces it to something small and, to an unknowing observer, seemingly inconsequential.
There's the dried pasta aisle in Waitrose that stops a grown man in his tracks, painful memories of his soldier son recently killed in Afghanistan assaulting his senses. Or the woman in her 70s whose entire life is pulled out from under her feet, when her now 48-year-old daughter claims that her father – the woman's elderly husband, who is now lying alone in their marital bed, she having removed herself to the spare room – sexually abused her as a child; the man who, recalling the innocent joy of reading the Beano and the Dandy during wet lunch times at primary school, muses, "I never thought then I'd end up being a warehouseman at Macintyre's dying for a smoke in my break"; or the make-or-break moment a young boy decides to carry a knife for the first time.
The title suggests something state-of-the-nation about the collection, which is not too bold a claim when one considers Swift's reputation as a chronicler of English life. His England is one pulsating with its past – the story entitled Haematology takes us as far back as the civil war – but by and large he's grounded in the contemporary, his protagonists the everymen and women who make up this country: from the Battersea-born cardiologist Dr Shah, who has never visited India but whose heritage is entwined with his profession ("the map of India as it had once appeared in old school atlases, in the 1950s, blush-red and plumply dangling, not unlike some other familiar shape"); the window cleaner who's made a tidy sum washing the windows of the buildings gleaming across the river from his Blackheath home, who sees his business partner's son, a flash young banker, hung out to dry; or the immigrant experience portrayed in microcosm in the figure of the "courageous" itinerant black comedian from Leeds, Johnny Dewhurst, who travels the length and breadth of the country in search of audiences, and who finds himself stranded on Exmoor.
As a collection, these initially disparate-seeming stories come together to build a coherent and cohesive whole; whether the same can be said for the lives depicted, Swift seems less sure. "What a terrible thing it can be just to be on this Earth," thinks a lonely widower who discovers a dead body on a solitary country walk. "First on the scene" for the only time in his life – but having dialled the emergency services, he's lost for words.
