FICTION
HERE WE ARE
By Graham Swift
Scribner/Paperback/208 pages/$25.15/Available at bit.ly/Here_GS/3 stars
For a book about magicians and summer entertainment in a seaside town, Here We Are is surprisingly flat and uninspiring, even though it is the latest work of Booker Prize winner Graham Swift.
The year is 1959 and Ronnie (or Pablo on stage) is an up-and-coming magician and Evie his assistant. They are the star attractions of a summer show in Brighton hosted by song-and-dance man Jack Robinson, also known as Jack Robbins.
Ronnie and Evie are engaged to be married, but ladies’ man Jack waits in the wings and things take a turn that is not hard to predict.
The blurb on the preview copy calls the novel “a masterly piece of literary magicianship which pulls back the curtain on the human condition”.
I’m not sure if there is any insight about the human condition to be had in this novel about three rather unattractive characters.
But I have to say Swift is a master in peeling off the surfaces of words and phrases to reveal their contradictions and inadequacy.
“Jack Robbins and Evie White were two of a kind and perhaps, in those days, of a quite numerous breed,” he writes of the two who had started out as budding child entertainers, making one wonder how special is special.
Elsewhere, Swift muses on the vagueness of magic.
In one passage about Evie, he writes: “‘Windfall,’ she would think later, was a bit like saying ‘sorcerer’. It was a hocus-pocus sort of word that might mean anything.”
Later, when she thinks about whether to accept the job as Ronnie’s stage assistant, she “was under no ‘illusions’ herself” that her principal role might be of “adornment”.
Swift’s play on words here is enjoyable in itself. And you can make a case that he is deconstructing language the way he is, yes, pulling back the curtain, on magic tricks created by Ronnie and Evie.
As in many of the writer’s books, nostalgia figures strongly in the novel as Evie looks back on the events of 1959 from the vantage point of 2009; and also because 1959 represents the last hurrah of such seaside resort shows, with television poised to take off in the 1960s.
It is a fairly interesting look into the England of seaside shows and very English in its settings and sayings.
Take the passage describing one half of a kind couple who takes Ronnie in during the war: “Mrs Lawrence had a very nice way of saying… ‘Here we are!’ And Ronnie had come to love this bright and strangely echoing phrase.”
Yet, epic or philosophical, the book is not.
That would instead be Swift’s previous book, Mothering Sunday, which is laser-like in its focus, taking off from a pivotal day in the life of a house maid, on March 30, 1924.
One marvels at how he infuses the simple phrase of “a clean sheet” with layers of meaning. Now, that is way more magical than anything Here We Are has to offer.
If you like this, read: Mothering Sunday (Scribner, 2017, $18.30, available at bit.ly/Mothering_GS), a sensual and lyrical book that looks at arrivals and departures and the acquisition of language.
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