The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
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evidently come between them, as the book insistently reminds us by cutting every so often to the late 2000s, when Evie, now the widow of the popular television star Jack Robbins, keeps returning in memory and fantasy to the days of the love triangle that shaped her life. What happened to Ronnie? What happened, indeed, to the days when popular entertainment meant an evening out at the pier?
The “accepted notion” of an artist’s “late” style, Edward Said wrote, “is that age confers a spirit of reconciliation and serenity on late works, often expressed in terms of a miraculous transfiguration of reality”. Shakespeare’s Tempest provides the clearest instance of the style: the artist in the fullness of his powers lays aside his mantle, forgiving all. Swift’s late style – as it’s now fair to call it – fits the traditional mould.
The marvellous central section of Here We Are takes us back to Ronnie’s childhood as a wartime evacuee from Bethnal Green to the countryside. Separated from a mother he has never had a chance to know, he lands up at what he comes to think of as “an enchanted place called Evergrene”, a house outside Oxford, where his guardians are Eric and Penny Lawrence, a middle-class couple with a keen interest in magic. This is magic in the sense of stage illusions. Ronnie proves himself a keen student of the Lawrences’ art and imbibes something of their compulsively optimistic manner. “Mrs Lawrence had a very nice way of saying whenever she proffered something… ‘Here we are!’ And Ronnie had come to love this bright and strangely echoing phrase. Here we are! How happy. And true.”
When he pulls off his first successful illusion for the Lawrences, it seems to him that he has “done something quite out of the ordinary, even ‘impossible’, and the power to do it was with him. It was not just that a vase of flowers had appeared from nowhere. He himself had become a different person.” The transformation is in part one of class, but The Great Pablo is not simply a child turned middleclass by the war: he has been declassed in the more basic sense of having become too protean, too much of a performer, to be defined by his origins.
Swift brings his old lyricism to a new landscape. A particularly fine passage evokes Evie’s postcoital moments, on a cold November afternoon, with Ronnie at his “grubby little flat”, stroking the hairs on his chest that have “a pleasing roughnessyet-silkiness” catching the light from the “electric fire, a Belling portable positioned not far away on the floor with its bars blazing… Now and then it clicked and twanged.” This is, in both senses of the word, sensuous writing: images, sounds, smells and textures working together to conjure up Brighton in 1959, a world before television soaps and central heating.
Like the illusions Ronnie pulls off on the Brighton stage, Swift executes his surprise ending in plain sight. Nothing is hidden, everything on show, and yet, the reveal – why Evie didn’t marry Ronnie – when it comes, is both a surprise and a delight. It fully justifies the ominous build-up from the first chapter onwards without simply giving us what we have been hoping for, or indeed dreading. Here we are, it says, leaving the reader to wonder how we were brought here.
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