It is perhaps too temptingly easy to regard a writer's early productions through the lens of the later work that you have read first: in Graham Swift's case, reading back from Waterland, say, may be to cast his earlier fiction in the mould of that much admired third novel. On the other hand, it is often illuminating to see from the beginning how consistent (or not) are an author's cast of mind, fictional strategies and preferred subject matter as they work towards fuller realization in the well- known books of their maturity, and Swift's first novels are no exception. Indeed, from the start, recurrent characteristics of his writing are inescapably evident: first-person narration by male characters (an exception is The Sweet Shop Owner - and even there the third person is used equivocally); a focus on damaged personal relationships in a contemporary bourgeois setting; and early forays into themes that have since become Swift's trademark: the interpenetration of past and present, what is ‘real’ and what is not, the problematics of ‘telling stories’.

The Sweet Shop Owner recounts the lives of Willy Chapman, his wife, Irene, their daughter Dorothy, and the relationships between the three of them, from 1937 when Willy and Irene first meet and marry, through the death of Irene in July/August of 1973, to ‘the present’ of the novel, a June day in 1974 that is also Doroth's twenty-fifth birthday. During this day, Willy secretly pays off the staff of his sweet shop, and then waits willingly, on the final page of the book, for the heart attack that will finally kill him. The novel thus spans the Second World War, but also looks back to events and their effects from the First World War onwards. Two points may be deduced from this summary: first, that ordinary lives - and they are very ordinary - are somehow contextualized by the twentieth centur's major wars; and, second, that the chronology of the novel is extremely precise, right down to exact months and years.

Let me take the second point first, and return to the significance of war later on. One might reasonably ask: what is so extraordinary about chronological precision?