“Here We Are“ by Graham Swift:
Another brilliant story by Graham Swift, a tale straight out of life with just the right amount of magic and wonder. Not only is there magic on stage like the inexplicable appearing or vanishing of things and persons, there is the vanishing act of life itself, its mostly unwelcome but inevitable decline into old age and death, its highlights like love, friendship, devotion, mercy and forgiveness, but also its cruel disappointments and betrayals which are all too humanly comprehensible but nevertheless formative and life defining.
All brilliantly and with great insight told by Swift who again, as in his last novel from 2016, Mothering Sunday, has achieved a remarkable piece of magical writing, a quiet novella full of palpable regret that eventually finds consolation. It is a short book but it contains a whole life. Or rather, the lives of three people whom fate chose to throw together.
It is the postwar summer of 1959, England and a new variety show is all the talk among the tourists and crowds on Brighton pier. It is here the fate of a love triangle is about to unfold. There is Ronnie Deane, later known as The Great Pablo, who, in World War II at the age of eight, is torn from his poor, fatherless and often miserable home in Blitz-tormented London and evacuated to a save home in the country. Here he is received by a childless couple with open arms and love. Ronnie soon accepts and even loves his new parents. Through his new foster father he learns the trade of a stage magician and excels in it.
Then there is Evie White, who became his assistant on stage and his fiancée. From early childhood on she was brought to every imaginable and available casting by her mother to perform as a dancer, singer or chorus-girl and when she finally met Ronnie she fell in love with him and the two were engaged to be married soon.
But then Ronnie’s biological mother died and he had to leave for London and during his 2-day-absence Evie’s love for Ronnie sadly and inexplicably transformed into love for actor Jack Robbins, Ronnie’s best friend and compere of the show they all were part of.
As Ronnie came back from London he immediately saw in Evie’s eyes what had happened and the next day he simply vanished, never to be seen again, never to be heard of.
50 years later, Evie, now 75 years old, on her husband Jack’s death anniversary, remembers and looks back on her life. Looking back together with Evie on more than half a century the reader is forced to re-evaluate the picture he formed of her, Jack and Ronnie.
This is a gentle and forgiving novella, a masterpiece in compressed story-telling, that transforms a commonplace love story into a complex narrative full of profound emotion that stays with the reader for a long time.
As an epigraph Graham Swift used "It's life's illusions I recall" from Joni Mitchell‘s song “Both Sides Now”: The ending line is well remembered: “I really don't know life, at all."
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