Here We Are by Graham Swift

Here We Are takes us back six decades to Brighton, 1959, and an end of the pier show where Jack Robinson, real name Robbins, is the compere; Ronnie Deane, stage name “The Great Pablo”, is the brilliant young illusionist; and his fiancée Evie the girl he saws in half.

They are a threesome, for Jack and Ronnie are old friends and Jack got them this job, but Evie will, we discover very early on, be Jack’s wife for 50 years while Ronnie will have vanished the way illusionists make things vanish.

Ronnie, we learn, was evacuated from London during the Second World War, and went to live with a nice elderly couple in a nice house in Oxfordshire, where the husband introduced him to stage magic. The England of post-war Austerity meant National Service for Ronnie and Jack but this world of end-of-the-pier shows and draught Bass and the Brighton Belle is long gone, surviving here only in the memory of 75-year-old Evie, a year after Jack’s death. The novel is suffused with nostalgia, both sweet and sour.

Graham Swift has always been a novelist with the lightest of touches. He can give you the loneliness of childhood in a couple of paragraphs, or catch the uncertainty that lurks beneath Jack’s stage-manner jauntiness in a sentence. This means he demands careful reading.

Here We Are is a delight, all the characters and the settings thoroughly imagined and therefore inhabited. The description of the Great Pablo’s last astonishing illusion is masterly; you can sense the audience holding their breath and caught between astonishment and belief.

There is never anything flashy about Swift’s novels, but they are deeply satisfying. They are books you want to read a second time to get more from them.