Here We Are
Graham Swift
Way back in 1983, Graham Swift wrote the novel – Waterland – that made him famous, or at least almost famous, as he is the Invisible Man of English Letters, rarely signing books at literary festivals or holding forth on Newsnight.
Waterland was about the way human beings are driven to tell stories. ‘Only animals live entirely in the Here and Now,’ says the history teacher at the heart of the novel. ‘Only nature knows neither memory nor history. But man – let me offer you a definition – is the storytelling animal… He has to go on telling stories. He has to keep making them up. As long as there’s a story, it’s all right. Even in his last moments, it’s said, in the split-second of a fatal fall – or even when he’s about to drown – he sees, passing rapidly before him, the story of his whole life.’ He then concludes: ‘For most of the time the Here and Now is neither now nor here.’
Here We Are by Graham Swift is a novel about Ronnie Deane, better known as the magician The Great Pablo, and Evie as his on-stage assistant. For a book about magic, its prose – simple, straightforward, more of a summary than an enactment – is curiously unmagical
Thirty-seven years on, Swift’s latest novel pursues much the same theme. It is called Here We Are, rather than Here and Now, but the author is still cracking away at the same nut. Humans live in the present, but our minds dwell in the past. As Scott Fitzgerald has it, in his most famous and beautiful line: ‘So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.’
Here We Are opens in a theatre in Brighton, 1959. A snazzy tap-dancing showbiz personality called Jack Robinson – ‘Mr Nod- and-a-wink, Mr Make-’em-laugh, make-’em smile, make-’em-swoon’ – is waiting in the wings, ready to compere a variety show. The world of entertainment is on the cusp of change. Along with the jugglers and plate-spinners, he has to introduce a pop group, The Rockabye Boys, ‘wearing jeans and leather jackets, and twanging guitars’.
It is a fading world, in many ways reminiscent of John Osborne’s play The Entertainer. Osborne’s old song-and-dance man, Archie Rice, says things like ‘Don’t clap too loudly. It’s a very old building!’, and Jack Robinson says: ‘You’re in Brighton, folks, so bloody well brighten up!’
Top of the bill, and central to the novel, is Ronnie Deane, better known as the magician The Great Pablo, who is also a recognisable showbiz type. Along with more than a million other children, Ronnie Deane had been evacuated during the Second World War, leaving his fractious parents in Bethnal Green to live with a friendly, cultured couple in a large house in the Oxfordshire countryside.
Some years ago, I reviewed a marvellous book about evacuees called When the Children Came Home. Though there had been well-publicised tales of evacuated children being treated badly by foster parents, the author, Julie Summers, reckoned that 85 per cent had enjoyed a happy time in their new homes – so much so, in fact, that many of them found it hard to return to parents they barely recognised, often living in conditions far less comfortable than those to which they had become accustomed. Those who came back from America or Australia returned with American or Australian accents, and often found it hard to understand what their real parents were saying.
A surprising number of British actors and entertainers – Michael Caine, Des O’Connor, Tommy Steele, Bruce Forsyth – were evacuated during the war. Some, like Swift’s hero Ronnie Deane, found the experience transformative, their new guardians introducing them to a magical world of culture and entertainment from which they had been barred at home.
Ronnie takes on a glamourpuss called Evie as his on-stage assistant, ready and willing to be sawn in half twice a night
My favourite comic actor, Kenneth Williams, left his bullying, philistine father, a barber in Bloomsbury, for what he called ‘a magical abode’ in Oxfordshire, to be looked after by a retired vet who loved to recite poetry and to sing old ballads. From him, the young Kenneth discovered new horizons, as well as learning the importance of diction, and the thrill of the dramatic pause.
Like Williams, the eight-year-old Ronnie Deane prefers his new surroundings to those he left behind. His new parents are friendly and full of fun and glamour. ‘He soon forgot about the war and quickly began to believe that this place he’d been sent to was where he really belonged, even that his previous life, including his home in Bethnal Green and the existence of his own parents, Agnes and Sid, must have been the result of some mix-up or misunderstanding.’ The regular postcards sent between Ronnie and his mother are agonisingly short. ‘All well here – Love Mum.’ ‘All well here – Love Ronnie.’
Meanwhile, his foster father shows him how to perform magic tricks. When young Ronnie learns how to make a vase of flowers appear from nowhere, he realises that life will never be the same again, because ‘he himself had become a different person’. The moment he returns home six years later, he feels an immediate sense of disappointment. ‘This little house in Bethnal Green – how little it seemed – enclosed him like a prison.’
Here We Are is a very neatly crafted story about transformation, with appearances and disappearances at its heart. Jack Robinson, the song-and-dance man, and Ronnie Deane, the magician, briefly form a double act, before deciding to go their own ways. Ronnie takes on a glamourpuss called Evie as his on-stage assistant, ready and willing to be sawn in half twice a night. ‘She had the legs, they would only get longer and lovelier, and she had the looks and knew how to use them.’
The novel shifts back and forth in time, sometimes muddlingly so. In 2009, the elderly Evie, now retired and living in Brighton, looks back on the events of a single day, 60 years before, trying to work out what had happened, and how things might have happened differently.
Here We Are is a very short book, more of a novella than a novel. So was Graham Swift’s last book, Mothering Sunday, which also involved an old lady looking back on the life-changing events of a single day, many decades before. But whereas Mothering Sunday was a masterpiece of restraint, its every paragraph hinting at unspoken depths, Here We Are seems much blunter, more rushed and artificial. It is almost as though it were a synopsis for a novel Swift was planning, rather than the novel itself.
For a book about magic, its prose – simple, straightforward, more of a summary than an enactment – is curiously unmagical. The story ends with a tremendous coup de théâtre, but the effect is strangely underwhelming, possibly because of the matter- of-fact way in which it is told. Just at the moment when exuberant, magical, breathtaking prose is needed, Swift retreats into workaday monosyllables. The reticence that made Mothering Sunday so memorable here looks more like timidity.