What lies beyond

Exit Strategies, by John Freeman, Granta, £12.99, 264 pages

“Exit strategies” is one of those hard-edged euphemisms that has come to be employed by military commanders and politicians. It belies a certain inescapable truth, suggesting as it does a greater control over events than perhaps really exists.

The latest issue of the literary quarterly Granta addresses death, and what emerges from its pages is the way we try to draw connections, shape and form our experiences, and cling to control where there is none. Claire Messud’s piece about the death of her father and her voyage to Beirut, the city of his childhood, in an attempt to offer him – and her – some solace at the end counterpoints John Barth’s short but elegant musing on the end of a writer’s career when the words no longer come.

Elsewhere, Alice Munro heartbreakingly chronicles a confused outing by an elderly woman and Anne Tyler, in an extract from her new novel The Beginner’s Goodbye, tells of a man trying to go on living after his wife has died, ignoring the hole in his life.