Here We Are

by Graham Swift Simon & Schuster 208pp £14.99 The Week bookshop £12.99

In his 11th novel, former Booker Prize-winner Graham Swift offers a pleasurable excursion into the “recent, yet strangely ancient past”, said Simon Baker in Literary Review. The action is set mainly in 1959 – that innocent time before the arrival of “the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and colour television”. Ronnie, Evie and Jack are three young variety show performers who achieve top billing on Brighton pier: Ronnie is a talented magician; Evie, his fiancée, is a “classic magician’s foil”; handsome Jack is a charismatic master of ceremonies. All three seem set for bright futures – until Evie finds herself falling for Jack, prompting a sequence of events that “changes things permanently”. Here We Are is a “haunting read”, which resonates far beyond its “grin-and-greasepaint milieu”, said Peter Kemp in The Sunday Times. Displaying a “wizardry” of his own, Swift recreates his about-to-vanish world with “pitch-perfect gusto”.

Like much of Swift’s fiction, this novel harks back to an England of “ginger beer, cold frames, magicians in top hats and people called Ronnie”, said John Self in The Spectator. The vision it offers is “comforting and cosy”, but also “mildly inconsequential”. And for a book about showbiz, it’s “weirdly lacking in pizzazz”. The story is “light, perhaps slight” at times, said Barney Norris in The Guardian. However, the richly fleshed-out characters more than compensate. For instance, through the story of Ronnie (whom, we discover, moved from East End Bethnal Green to Oxfordshire during his childhood), Swift “wonderfully captures the experience of evacuation during the Second World War”. Here We Are is a “magical piece of writing: the work of a novelist on scintillating form”.