Brighton, 1959, and the end-of-the-pier show is going out of fashion as television becomes the natural vehicle for 'variety'. Ronnie learns magic while an evacuee in the war, as a 'sorceror's apprentice' and, having engaged Evie as his assistant and got engaged to her. too, makes his way to the top of the bill compered by Jack Robinson. Except Evie marries Jack.They are all acting their parts, not really the Great Pablo, or Jack Robinson, and as early as the first page a regular Swift theme emerges,
the paralysing question of who he was in the first place.
Swift's default technique, though, is for his chracters to die. Having been reading more of the back catalogue, one comes to expect it, from Last Orders, Waterland and Mothering Sumday to Ever After and Wish You Were Here. In Here We Are, we are bereaved on pages 44, 77 and 118. Ronnie's father was sunk in the Merchant Navy in 1940 before the story begins and if the disappearance we are left with is some sort of illusion or magic trick, it's difficult to escape the conclusion that he might have joined the body count.
While death is a constant feature in Swift, as it was in Medieval times, we might make it put the living into greater relief and make them more vividly alive but after a while we are more likely to conclude that the living are implicitly as much ghosts as those presences that haunt so many of his stories. I came in the hope of defending a favourite fiction writer against the charges in Johanna Thomas-Corr's review in The Times but she's planted some seeds of doubt and, compared to the lively prose of the opening chapters of Ever After, this isn't perhaps his best work. I was hoping for Walter Sickert's Brighton Pierrots, more jaded vaudeville, more cheap glamour. I can see why Johanna calls it 'pale, watery' and Swift's facility is its own problem when left in third gear.
None of which is to say it's not a good book and work reading because ordinary Swift is the equivalent of very good by anybody else and so it's more about 'managing expectations' because when his name is on the front, we have been led to expect more.
But, as a follow up to the brilliant Mothering Sunday, Here We Are is as bit 'pale'. Even the title brings to mind Be Here Now, the Oasis album that signalled they were running out of ideas and switching to automatic pilot.
The sudden bereavements, as they occur, don't have the shock value they might have had if there were fewer of them. The shock comes with the realization that Evie has married Jack and the reasons for that lead us into something more interesting and possibly troubling. The mysterious ending is likely to be related to the mysterious shift in the middle.
At the centre of Ronnie's story of displacement, of being somebody else, of illusion and lowbrow showmanship, is a terrible vacuum. If we start to rebuild our appreciation of the novel, having accepted that it looks a bit shallow like the stage act itself, it's a very worthwhile book. Nobody writes masterpieces all the time but, on the other hand, Graham Swift doesn't write bad books.