Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Here We Are by Graham Swift Here We Are by Graham Swift. Completing the CAPTCHA proves you are a human and gives you temporary access to the web property. What can I do to prevent this in the future? If you are on a personal connection, like at home, you can run an anti-virus scan on your device to make sure it is not infected with malware. If you are at an office or shared network, you can ask the network administrator to run a scan across the network looking for misconfigured or infected devices. Another way to prevent getting this page in the future is to use Privacy Pass. You may need to download version 2.0 now from the Chrome Web Store. Cloudflare Ray ID: 65fdd99cf863cc4e • Your IP : 116.202.236.252 • Performance & security by Cloudflare. Here We Are review – breathtaking storytelling from Graham Swift. S ome 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. Cookie Consent and Choices. NPR’s sites use cookies, similar tracking and storage technologies, and information about the device you use to access our sites (together, “cookies”) to enhance your viewing, listening and user experience, personalize content, personalize messages from NPR’s sponsors, provide social media features, and analyze NPR’s traffic. This information is shared with social media, sponsorship, analytics, and other vendors or service providers. See details. You may click on “ Your Choices ” below to learn about and use cookie management tools to limit use of cookies when you visit NPR’s sites. You can adjust your cookie choices in those tools at any time. If you click “ Agree and Continue ” below, you acknowledge that your cookie choices in those tools will be respected and that you otherwise agree to the use of cookies on NPR’s sites. Here We Are by Graham Swift. Here We Are. By Graham Swift. Knopf. 208 pp. $22.95. Reviewed by Ron Charles. Catching a bullet and making the Statue of Liberty disappear are awesome tricks, but the best magicians don’t need such extravagance. I learned that truth long after hanging up my cape and leaving the birthday party racket for good. Despite years of admiring David Copperfield, the only time I felt the disorienting amazement of actual magic was while talking with a street performer outside a Boston subway station. His setup couldn’t have been more modest, but when he made a card appear under my own hand, I stumbled around all day like I’d been in the presence of Merlin. Graham Swift is no common street performer — he won the Booker Prize in 1996 — but he appreciates the transcendent artistry of small works perfectly performed. His slim new novel, Here We Are , transports us to a seaside theater in Brighton, England, during the summer of 1959. It’s about young love and the little acts of chance and villainy that realign lives. The theater is nothing special, Swift assures us, just a variety show sporting jugglers and plate-spinners, singers, and ventriloquists. But the man who holds the reins is a dashing young emcee named Jack Robinson. The audience has the impression “that it was his show,” Swift writes. “They came to be taken under his wing and it wouldn’t have been the same without him. Your pal for the night, your host with the most. Off stage he’d say he was just the oil in the wheels — the oilier the better.” That’s not a bad description of this stylish narrator, too, who keeps the story sliding along so quickly that you’ll barely notice his sleight of hand. It’s Jack’s idea to give his old army buddy, Ronnie, a break. Ronnie — known professionally as “Pablo” — has an impressive magic act. With his red-lined black cape, white gloves, and “bold fluid movements,” he looks like “Count Dracula’s little brother.” What he needs, though, is a sexy assistant, and as luck would have it, Evie is the only one who answers his ad. “They were a natural pair,” Swift writes. “The tricks were good, but she was the best trick of the lot.” He runs swords through Evie; he makes her levitate; he makes her disappear — and reappear. “The act had become a fluid phenomenon, yet full of thrilling tension. You never knew what might happen next. This in itself became part of the attraction.” The audience on the pier goes crazy for the two of them. The local paper says they’ve “taken Brighton by storm.” Although they're all friends that summer — "a lopsided trio" — Ronnie and Evie's magic act might even be more popular than Jack himself. Of course, as emcee, Jack doesn't mind; the success of the show is all that matters. But poor Evie finds her affections sawed in half. Starting with that ambiguous title, Here We Are is about the interplay of stage magic and life’s tricks. Like Anne Enright’s Actress, which was published earlier this year, Swift’s novel explores the tension between persona and character, the strain of maintaining public and private personalities. Actors, at least, have a professional excuse; the rest of us, he suggests, perform free, donning one costume and role after another. The trouble is we rarely admit it. Five pages into Here We Are , Swift is already dropping clues about what’s ahead for these summer friends. “Ronnie and Evie,” he writes, “having had a remarkable debut, coming from nowhere to achieve summer fame and having secured for themselves, it would seem, future booking, even a whole career, never appeared on stage again. Ronnie never appeared again at all.” If this were a tweedy English mystery, the magician’s body would wash up on shore on the last day of summer. But Swift is pursuing subtler crimes and larger mysteries. He has a penchant for long-festering secrets that warp lives. Indeed, his 2007 novel, Tomorrow , was a ridiculous fever dream of concealed information. Here, fortunately, Swift gets the tone just right, and the magician’s act provides a wry context for Ronnie’s disappearance. But the real magic may be the way Swift moves through time. Flashbacks unveil young Ronnie’s magical childhood during World War II, when London shipped children out into the countryside for safety. And other sections leap ahead half a century to show Evie’s retirement in the early 21st century. Then and now, so much depends on the alchemy of luck and desire. With a sigh, Swift captures the tragicomedy of human life in a single phrase: “The things that we do.” Before we know it, here we are, looking back on lives that will never give their secrets away. Here We Are by Graham Swift, review: a marvellous tale of post-war love and magic. Graham Swift’s early books wore their experiments on their sleeve. The best among them, Waterland (1983), has aged well. Its postmodern devices – the non-chronological structure, the lengthy theoretical asides about history and narrative – may have been passé even then. Still, Swift’s exact and lyrical prose about the fenlands places it in the vanguard of the now flourishing tradition of English landscape writing. Swift has achieved similar success with other equally distinctive settings even as the experiments waned or got subtler: the journey from Bermondsey pub to the sea at Margate in Last Orders (1996) and the inter-war English country house of his much-admired previous book, Mothering Sunday (2016).