Book review: 'Wish You Were Here'

Book: Wish You Were Here
Graham Swift
Picador
352 pages
Rs350

Wish You Were Here is an unhurried novel. It comments on the after-effects of events of international importance, maintaining that their consequences are in a strictly, almost claustrophobically, personal sphere.

It opens in 2006, on the Isle of Wight in England, with a man contemplating madness. Ex-farmer Jack Luxton has a shotgun, and enough bitter memories for him to use it. Memories swirl through him and it is testimony to Swift’s superior style that the unconnected connect with such poignancy and ease. Jack remembers the “sixty-five head of healthy-seeming cattle that finally succumbed to the rushed-through culling order, leaving a silence and emptiness as hollow as the morning Mum died…”. He remembers the equally silent and stealthy departure of his brother Tom, for the army. He remembers how his father ended his life. He remembers the way his one-time girlfriend, and now wife, Ellie convinced him to sell the five-generation old farm and move across the country. Things come to a precipice when Tom is declared dead by the army.

For a book of such finely-tuned elegance, Wish You Were Here can be something of a trial. It demands patience from the reader, although the patience is certainly rewarded. There is no hurry to deliver a punch line. Jack sits on his bed, awaiting his wife’s return in the rain, with a loaded shotgun by his side, and that pregnant moment has a long gestation. Everything is revisited, with each re-examination making minute changes to the memory until the most ordinary words spoken by a mother, or lines from a letter written by a boy to a girl — “Wish you were here” — begin to take on the electrical charge of lightening in a thunderstorm. The relief then, at the most conclusive, unchangeable ending is huge and Swift does not disappoint.

Wish You Were Here exists almost entirely in the headspace of Jack Luxton, a large man whose physicality seems at odds with his extreme diffidence when it comes to matters of the heart. Yet, it casts a long shadow, dealing with the effects of the mad cow disease, the 9/11 attacks, the war on terror; taking us as far as Iraq and back to a soldier’s burial rituals in his home country that seem to alienate rather than comfort. The novel deals with a sustained sense of grief and only a seasoned master craftsman like Swift, whose earlier novel Last Orders won the Booker in 1996, can bring us the “great unearthly howl,” of an ordinary man caught in extraordinary times, and make it feel somehow personal.