HERE WE ARE

GRAHAM SWIFT

Scribner, 195pp, £14.99

Graham Swift’s latest novel is set in the 1950s, among performers in an end-of-pier seaside magic show. It is, as Simon Baker in the Literary

Review reflected, ‘a pleasurable, low-gear excursion into the recent, yet strangely ancient past’.

Barney Norris in the Guardian condensed the plot: ‘Evie White, widow of the actor Jack Robbins, goes out for lunch on the first anniversary of her husband’s death. Then she returns home, walks into the garden where Jack’s ashes were scattered, and suddenly sees all the cobwebs glittering in the dew around her, before heading back inside and upstairs to sleep. What she remembers in the course of this slight day, though, is a story that spans half a century, an account of the great vanishing act of life, which is as light and brilliant as the cobwebs in the garden.’

Reviewers for the most part enjoyed the un-showiness. As Lindsay Duguid put it in the TLS: ‘Swift’s style, following his characters, is casual and colloquial, as he smoothly propels the action. As well as being an old-fashioned story told in an old-fashioned style, Here We

Are has an emotional reticence, a reluctance to stir the reader’s feelings too far beyond the rueful tears of a survivor.’ It wasn’t quite enough for the Spectator’s John Self: ‘It’s comforting and cosy ... but it does make the effort of reading it feel mildly inconsequential. It’s a bit sad, a bit funny, a bit interesting — but only a bit.’