Graham Swift - Wish You Were Here

Graham Swift, Wish You Were Here (Picador)

Graham Swift's Wish You Were Here relates the circumstances of the repatriation of a soldeir's body from Iraq. In Last Orders, a group of friends take the ashes of their mate to Margate; in Waterland, a body is found on the fens and there's a suicide, too.

There's a recurring theme among these, which is augmented in the latest book with the shooting of the family pet dog, Luke, when he was terminally ill and the slaughter of cattle in the B.S.E. epidemic.

And yet, with the soldier, Tom, being Jack's brother, 8 years younger and not seen for 13 years, not contacted for 12; the dysfunctional relationship they had with their moody father and Jack's wife, Ellie, not feeling that she is a part of the occasion of the return of the brother, it is the distance between people in these family and ceremonial situations that is really Swift's theme.

Jack's awkwardness as part of the proceedings constitutes a significant part of this separation from shared emotion as when he wrote a childhood postcard to Ellie saying, 'wish you were here', which he meant sincerely not realizing it was the standard cliche to write.

With Ellie at home on their Isle of Wight caravan park, Jack is aware of the distance between them,

It seemed to him that there was now a difference, a gap, between Ellie and him as plain as that strip of choppy sea he's crossed this morning.

He had felt as if his passport, carried for identification for the Army, might be required as he landed at Portsmouth from the island, which has become a home he is attached to just as much as the Devon farm that his family had owned for generations before.

As the journey to meet the body is mixed with flashbacks that build up this past life, we are asked to add to the catalogue of tragic deaths the suicide of his father by his own shotgun on the farm. As a portrait of the 'condition of England', even one as pessimistic and disenchanted as I began to wonder if this wasn't laying it on too heavily.

Rural economic decline, cattle disease and family dysfunction combine to sweep away characters with undue haste. Swift is a marvellous writer of a sentence, a great psychologist and describes his cast with great art but, please, as the motifs and symbols pile up in the text, so do the bodies just as rapidly in the plot.

The ghost of Tom haunts Jack in the second half of the book as it picks up in tempo and tilts towards madness and an ending you think surely isn't going to do what you think it's going to do and, then, well, I can hardly spoil it for you here.