Some writers are like old friends – you can lose touch with their work and pick up right where you left off. I stopped reading Graham Swift after 2007’s disappointing Tomorrow, but returned to him in 2016, when Mothering Sunday, a slight, sad, poised novel, was published to a host of glowing reviews. I was surprised to find Swift was no longer anything like the writer I remembered. Here was a late-period voice, elegiac and wistful, with prose far from the sophisticated experimentation of Shuttlecock and Waterland, or the sure-footed mastery of the Booker-winning Last Orders and its underrated successor The Light of Day. Here We Are comes (for Swift) hot on the heels of its predecessor, and summons the same atmosphere: this is a novella suffused with quietness, regret and, eventually, consolation.
Short books can be big in the mind, particularly when they contain whole lives within them. Here We Are is the story of a love triangle, although the Jules et Jim in this case are Ronnie “the Great Pablo” Deane, a magician, and his friend, the actor Jack Robbins. Ronnie is initially engaged to his sidekick, former chorus-girl Evie White, but then, almost without the reader noticing it, she is drawn to Jack, and Ronnie fades into the background as Jack’s career takes off.
The novella pivots on a moment halfway through what has until this point been a fairly conventional narrative concerning the early years of Ronnie, Evie and Jack as they make their way in the postwar music hall scene, playing to crowds on Brighton pier. Swift inserts a paragraph break and then we read: “Now Evie White is seventy-five.” It’s a brilliant opening up of perspective, redolent of similar revelatory key changes in Philip Roth’s Nemesis or Alice Munro’s Dear Life. As Evie looks back on the more than half a century that has passed since her Brighton days, we are forced to re-evaluate the picture we have of her, Jack and, particularly, Ronnie.
This is a beautiful, gentle, intricate novella, the kind of book that stays with you despite not appearing to do anything particularly new or special. In fact, perhaps that’s what makes it so very good: Here We Are smuggles within the pages of a seemingly commonplace tale depths of emotion and narrative complexity that take the breath away.
• Here We Are by Graham Swift is published by Scribner (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15
