An island of one

A British soldier’s death in Iraq spurs his stolid brother on a journey of discovery in this novel, writes Stacey D’erasmo

The intersection of the global and the nearly indetectable, even subatomic, realms of the personal is territory Graham Swift maps with particular acuity. His sense of leverage, and of the vectors of connection between, say, the way a woman sits in a car on the Isle of Wight and the horror of September 11, is exquisite. From his early novel Waterland (which interweaves a marriage, a kidnapping, 300 years of the history of the Fens and the ways of the eel) to the novel that won him the Booker Prize, Last Orders (which tracks the spoken and unspoken connections among a group of elderly World War II veterans gathered in a pub), Swift has used extraordinarily subtle means to talk about the way we live now and how it’s infused not only with the way we lived then but with the way other people lived, and live.

He has what might be described as an old-­fashioned humanist sensibility; the unearthing of buried emotion, and the consequences of that unearthing, is his métier. Jamesian in sensibility and to some degree in style, he finds tragedy in the most ordinary conversation, redemption in the way one character offers another an umbrella. You forget how piercing this sort of thing can be until you see Swift doing it so well, and with such patience. The depth of field in a Swift novel, thematically and emotionally, is vast. At his best, he suggests that looking intently at the smallest, most mundane thing can yield a glimpse into the meaning of life.

In Wish You Were Here, Swift trains this searching, compassionate gaze on a middle-aged couple, Jack and Ellie, who run a caravan park on the Isle of Wight. It’s 2006. Both Jack and Ellie are the children of local dairymen, although the region’s dairy farms are long since defunct, in no small part because of the epidemic of mad cow disease that devastated the industry. Jack and Ellie have no children and the members of their extended families are mostly long dead, except for Jack’s brother, Tom, a soldier in Iraq who, as Jack learns in the opening pages, has just died there.

It falls to Jack to receive his brother’s remains — a process known as “repatriation” — and attend a ceremony at an air base in Oxfordshire, followed by a private burial in Devon. As this journey unfolds, the novel also excavates the respective pasts of Jack and Ellie with particular attention to the suicide of Jack’s father after a cancer diagnosis and the ruination of his farm. Working also, as it were, vertically, the novel tracks the way Tom’s death begins to undo his brother, first slowly, then very quickly, bringing him to an unforeseen inner brink, a terrible shattering.

Causality, in Swift’s hands, is buried, unpredictable; it runs through people and events in the odd way a water leak can move through a house, running down walls seemingly far removed from the source. Guns go off in the novel; there are weddings; there are funerals; there are inquests and revelations; hearts break; smoke rises from pyres. But none of these events happen in quite the order, or for the reasons you would expect. Moving gracefully and without fanfare among multiple points of view, the novel might be said to evoke a collective psychic wound that is expressed variously in various characters, simultaneously drawing people together and driving them irretrievably apart, destroying some lives and saving others according to its own unknowable agency.

Among the most beautifully made of Swift’s creations is the spectral, half-­living, half-dead Tom, a ghost who haunts the novel and everyone in it, but differently according to their different needs for, feelings toward and uses of him. Indeed, Tom is something between a ghost and a dream, or perhaps a dream of a ghost, who appears according to the sensibility of the dreamer, including Tom himself. He isn’t anything as simple as a renegade or a black sheep; he isn’t a lost soul; he doesn’t possess a secret involving love or money or violence that would explain his power. Instead, he represents something closer to a path not quite taken by Jack, another form in which their shared history in a particular time and place has played out, a variation on a generational theme.

After the farms died, some of their owners opened small businesses; some went to the cities; others joined the army. Like Annie Proulx, Swift traces what happens to communities of people who once lived on and by the land, but no longer can. Exiled in modern life, they’re perpetually haunted by alternate selves, tied and obligated to structures that no longer exist. Standing by Tom’s coffin, Jack wonders where his ghost has gone, then reflects: “No, Tom was with him, here in this box. All there was of Tom was here. He felt, though he couldn’t see Tom, couldn’t hear him, couldn’t see the signalling flickers in his face, that they were like two people waiting for something together, for the next thing to happen, and neither of them was sure who should make the first move, though it was foolish perhaps to delay.” In one of Swift’s most daring moves — and I won’t spoil it, since it closes all the novel’s narrative and thematic loops — Tom even becomes a strange sort of hero, although at a moment and in a manner far removed from the battlefields of Iraq.

Given this abundance of subtlety, tenderness and fluid prose, most readers will be able to adapt to the novel’s pace, which is at times so measured, so defined by indirect action that it can feel a bit as if one were watching an epic produced as a shadow play. Long blocks of expository text are often only briefly interrupted by one character saying something to another like, “I think we’d better cancel St Lucia,” which the astute reader is meant to understand as a devastating statement. One might, every now and then, be excused for wishing Swift could get to the point a little less discreetly and with less use of the past perfect tense. The teacups may be rattling because of an earthquake, but would it be so tacky to concentrate on the earthquake now and then, rather than the trembling china? However, asking such a crass question is probably like asking if Bach’s cello suites might be improved with a little backbeat. They wouldn’t, and such an addition would drown out the exquisite music. Swift’s empathic, far-reaching, ever so slightly eccentric melancholy is gorgeous just as it is.

The intersection of the global and the nearly indetectable, even subatomic, realms of the personal is territory Graham Swift maps with particular acuity. His sense of leverage, and of the vectors of connection between, say, the way a woman sits in a car on the Isle of Wight and the horror of September 11, is exquisite. From his early novel Waterland (which interweaves a marriage, a kidnapping, 300 years of the history of the Fens and the ways of the eel) to the novel that won him the Booker Prize, Last Orders (which tracks the spoken and unspoken connections among a group of elderly World War II veterans gathered in a pub), Swift has used extraordinarily subtle means to talk about the way we live now and how it’s infused not only with the way we lived then but with the way other people lived, and live.
He has what might be described as an old-­fashioned humanist sensibility; the unearthing of buried emotion, and the consequences of that unearthing, is his métier. Jamesian in sensibility and to some degree in style, he finds tragedy in the most ordinary conversation, redemption in the way one character offers another an umbrella. You forget how piercing this sort of thing can be until you see Swift doing it so well, and with such patience. The depth of field in a Swift novel, thematically and emotionally, is vast. At his best, he suggests that looking intently at the smallest, most mundane thing can yield a glimpse into the meaning of life.

In Wish You Were Here, Swift trains this searching, compassionate gaze on a middle-aged couple, Jack and Ellie, who run a caravan park on the Isle of Wight. It’s 2006. Both Jack and Ellie are the children of local dairymen, although the region’s dairy farms are long since defunct, in no small part because of the epidemic of mad cow disease that devastated the industry. Jack and Ellie have no children and the members of their extended families are mostly long dead, except for Jack’s brother, Tom, a soldier in Iraq who, as Jack learns in the opening pages, has just died there. It falls to Jack to receive his brother’s remains — a process known as “repatriation” — and attend a ceremony at an air base in Oxfordshire, followed by a private burial in Devon. As this journey unfolds, the novel also excavates the respective pasts of Jack and Ellie with particular attention to the suicide of Jack’s father after a cancer diagnosis and the ruination of his farm. Working also, as it were, vertically, the novel tracks the way Tom’s death begins to undo his brother, first slowly, then very quickly, bringing him to an unforeseen inner brink, a terrible shattering.

Causality, in Swift’s hands, is buried, unpredictable; it runs through people and events in the odd way a water leak can move through a house, running down walls seemingly far removed from the source. Guns go off in the novel; there are weddings; there are funerals; there are inquests and revelations; hearts break; smoke rises from pyres. But none of these events happen in quite the order, or for the reasons you would expect. Moving gracefully and without fanfare among multiple points of view, the novel might be said to evoke a collective psychic wound that is expressed variously in various characters, simultaneously drawing people together and driving them irretrievably apart, destroying some lives and saving others according to its own unknowable agency.

Among the most beautifully made of Swift’s creations is the spectral, half-­living, half-dead Tom, a ghost who haunts the novel and everyone in it, but differently according to their different needs for, feelings toward and uses of him. Indeed, Tom is something between a ghost and a dream, or perhaps a dream of a ghost, who appears according to the sensibility of the dreamer, including Tom himself. He isn’t anything as simple as a renegade or a black sheep; he isn’t a lost soul; he doesn’t possess a secret involving love or money or violence that would explain his power. Instead, he represents something closer to a path not quite taken by Jack, another form in which their shared history in a particular time and place has played out, a variation on a generational theme.

After the farms died, some of their owners opened small businesses; some went to the cities; others joined the army. Like Annie Proulx, Swift traces what happens to communities of people who once lived on and by the land, but no longer can. Exiled in modern life, they’re perpetually haunted by alternate selves, tied and obligated to structures that no longer exist. Standing by Tom’s coffin, Jack wonders where his ghost has gone, then reflects: “No, Tom was with him, here in this box. All there was of Tom was here. He felt, though he couldn’t see Tom, couldn’t hear him, couldn’t see the signalling flickers in his face, that they were like two people waiting for something together, for the next thing to happen, and neither of them was sure who should make the first move, though it was foolish perhaps to delay.” In one of Swift’s most daring moves — and I won’t spoil it, since it closes all the novel’s narrative and thematic loops — Tom even becomes a strange sort of hero, although at a moment and in a manner far removed from the battlefields of Iraq.

Given this abundance of subtlety, tenderness and fluid prose, most readers will be able to adapt to the novel’s pace, which is at times so measured, so defined by indirect action that it can feel a bit as if one were watching an epic produced as a shadow play. Long blocks of expository text are often only briefly interrupted by one character saying something to another like, “I think we’d better cancel St Lucia,” which the astute reader is meant to understand as a devastating statement. One might, every now and then, be excused for wishing Swift could get to the point a little less discreetly and with less use of the past perfect tense. The teacups may be rattling because of an earthquake, but would it be so tacky to concentrate on the earthquake now and then, rather than the trembling china? However, asking such a crass question is probably like asking if Bach’s cello suites might be improved with a little backbeat. They wouldn’t, and such an addition would drown out the exquisite music. Swift’s empathic, far-reaching, ever so slightly eccentric melancholy is gorgeous just as it is.

Wish You Were Here
Graham Swift
Picador
2011, pp 353
350

The New York Times