Pulling a Swifty
Virtuosic magic is both the subject and the delivery method in Graham Swift’s latest piece of storytelling.
Jack, Ronnie and Evie – the very names are redolent of seaside holiday entertainment on Brighton’s famous pier in the summer of 1959. Jack Robinson (actually and later Robbins) is the compère, the frontman, binding the acts together with his wit, a song or two – When the Red, Red Robin Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin’ Along – and a bit of fancy footwork. But it’s his friend Ronnie Deane, the Great Pablo, magician extraordinaire, and his assistant (and fiancée), the “delightful, the delectable, the delorious” Evie White, with her glittering costume, her ostrich plumes and her stunning legs, who are the real stars of the show.
But the events offstage that season and the way Ronnie’s life has been shaped by his childhood evacuation to Oxfordshire during the war are the real business of Graham Swift’s deft and subtle new novel, Here We Are. He is the master of period, of pinpoint-accurate dialogue, of place – whether it be cramped, bombedout, hard-scrabble Bethnal Green, genteel middle-class rural England or the gaudy yet gallant flimsiness of an entertainment style already under threat.
Ronnie’s years with Penny and Eric Lawrence at their home, Evergrene (again, the name says it all), inform the course of his life, for mild-mannered, kind Eric is also Lorenzo the magician, and he teaches the boy his craft. This experience and his subsequent success distance Ronnie from his mother. When she dies, her only son does not even get there in time to say goodbye.
There are many moments of reading pleasure – “gleaming needles” of rain “against still-dark clouds”, the “push and dare” of an illicit relationship, the “innocent, terrible act of waking up” when the loved one beside you has died in their sleep. The intimate, confiding tone Swift uses for most of the book, especially for Jack and Evie, is correctly gauged, but there are just too many questions; they can become intrusive and irritating.
Yet there is so much to relish and applaud. Swift understands and never judges the human condition – the everyday, unspectacular hurts and betrayals and the surprising joys. He is completely in control of character, situation and emotion. In less adept hands, the changes in the Jack/Evie/ Ronnie triumvirate could have become oversensational and/or sentimental. No chance of that with this author. He is adept, too, at writing about both men and women: his portrait of Evie, from youth to old age, is credible and touching.
Illusions – never tricks, Ronnie insists – are part of Here We Are, in both senses, but there are no unnecessary fireworks in this novel of quiet satisfactions, which also gently farewells an England that has now gone. Swift leaves us thinking about youth and age, about family, about chances taken and missed, about the nature of love.
Graham Swift is the master of period, of pinpoint-accurate dialogue, of place.