The paradox of people
HERE WE ARE by Graham Swift (Simon and Schuster, $33)
In his latest, modestly-sized fiction — novella rather than novel — Graham Swift returns to the narrative voice of Mothering
Sunday: an elderly woman recalling and excavating her youth, half a century on.
Three young performers inhabit the 1950s UK culture of beachfront shows, day-trippers and summer holidays. Brighton Pier is at its gaudy peak. Sleek, dark-haired Ronnie, soon to be reshaped as Pablo the Great, is soaring towards his zenith, with sumptuous assistant Evie, “the best trick of the lot” in her sequins and plumes. Watching benevolently from the wings is Jack, seasoned compere plus patter-and-dance man. What a team.
But it’s a team taut with growing tensions and as August 1959 passes, the straining of relationships among the trio begins to drive this quiet, emotionally potent story. While they go about their “rough, glittery, hopeful, deluded, stage-struck, thankless, magical business”, Swift guides us across years before and after. There’s much matter in a small space.
We read of Ronnie’s time as a child evacuee in World War II, his idyll in the countryside, his chance yet almost predestined introduction to a magician’s arts and his return to an abrasive, uninterested mother.
Meanwhile, Jack and Evie have also drifted to the stage. Jack and Ronnie meet during post-war National Service; friendship and professional bonds grow. Evie complements their careers perfectly. Success and fulfilment should follow; fracture and mystery build instead.
Plots which admit you to trade secrets are always rewarding and Here We Are is veined with such details: the microsecond timing of a stage entrance, the skills of jugglers, plate-spinners, Lord Archibald and his talking teddy bear, the impact of an onstage scream, white doves, a remarkable rainbow, other minutiae of illusion and distraction. If some remain elusive to the end, that’s utterly appropriate.
Professionally and temperamentally, the trio all live via pretence and misdirection recorded with an almost documentary precision of tone. Swift has long been intrigued by the enigmas of human choices and this is a story flecked with questions and riddles. Why do these authentically imperfect characters act as they do? Who are they, anyway? What else could they do or be, caught up as they are in “the thinness, the fakery of the plush rapt edifice around them”?
Wit and stoic humour glint through the plot’s melancholy. Swift remains an author who’s a consummate narrator of the transitory, blazing paradox of individual people.