WISH YOU WERE HERE

WISH YOU WERE HERE
By Graham Swift

In literature, the polysyllabic, multi- word sentence enchants with its eloquence. In real life, short, simple phrases strike straight to the heart.

When truly deep emotions are expressed, three words or four easily suffice to enthral, wound or captivate: 'I love you', 'I miss you'. In the case of British writer Graham Swift's latest novel, it is: 'Wish you were here.'

While a teen, the book's protagonist Jack Luxton writes this phrase on a postcard to his star-crossed sweetheart. He is unaware that the wording is considered trite. Neither would he care, for those four words, pulled out of him like a deeply rooted tooth, hold sagas-worth of love, yearning and sorrow.

He is capable of alarmingly deep sentiment and incapable of ever expressing it adequately. A scion of solid farming stock, he is of the type referred to as 'the salt of the earth', and other similar idioms around the world.

Seemingly unshaken by bad weather, crop disaster and cattle disease, his kind put in harsh, 16-hour-long days, until one final drought or blight leads them to the back barn and the solace of a noose or gun, leaving neighbours to wonder and mutter.

Death, the attendant grief of survivors and the ability or inability to express sorrow are themes Swift has visited before in the Booker Prize-winning Last Orders (1996), about friends with a shared war history carrying out the funeral wishes of one of their number.

In Wish You Were Here, he describes with quiet splendour the tight descent into anguish and raw emotion as a man, unable to say what he truly feels for his loved ones, is forced to deal with the demise of a beloved younger brother.

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Woven beautifully into the background are commentaries on war, families and the changes hitting the British farming community. This is a book that bears re-reading and is simultaneously hard to re-read for the sheer weight of emotion and detail packed into every paragraph.

'It meant something if you were born, as he was, on a farm: the name. The generations going back and forwards, like the hills, whichever way you looked, around them. And what else had his mother borne him for than to give him and show him his birthright?'

When Jack learns that his sibling Tom, a soldier, died in the invasion of Iraq, it is 2006 and he is long settled into a comfortable life as a caravan park owner.

Gone is the family farm, sold a decade ago, along with the attendant obligations to maintain the land and old feuds for future generations. Ellie, the childhood sweetheart long denied him by their fathers' long-standing hatred, is his beloved wife and business partner.

Business is good and they have money left over for a holiday every year in some sunny Caribbean clime. But buried deep are hidden tensions, slowly uncoiling to the surface, as Jack brings his brother's body back and lays it to rest next to his father's grave.

It is impossible for his current self to deny that he made the right choice in selling the farm and uprooting himself. Perhaps the same can be said of what Tom did, too, leaving agriculture for the army. But the funeral rites force Jack to confront the skeletons in his closet, his suspicions about the circumstances that freed him and Ellie from their farms and feud and, worst of all, all the words of love he was never able to express.

Wish You Were Here is brilliantly structured, taking the reader along ever-contracting whorls of remembrance that reveal a story within this story of grief and loss. Jack and Ellie's recollections of hardship and growing up portray changes in England's farming practices and political patterns, and provide a quiet elegy for what has been lost - while remaining honestly hopeful for the future.

Their memories of staying quiet when a deed or sentence could have changed everything will also strike a chord in anyone who has wished for a chance to set things right.

Their separate journeys into the past criss-cross into a tapestry that gives readers the full picture, while leaving unwelcome gaps in each character's knowledge of the other. The resulting tension is nail-biting and resolved suitably in a tense climax.
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