Wish You Were Here
By Graham Swift.
Picador (R190)
There’s nothing swift about Graham’s writing. Like a performer with a captive audience, enthralled or not, Swift takes his time. His punctuation, one could argue, is not a literary tool but part of his bragging rights. And it works!
Jebb Farmhouse could have been just another normal home of a farmer, Michael Luxton, his wife and two sons. But under Swift’s pen – thanks to his myriad commas, brackets, colons and semi-colons, this becomes not just another one of those hurried tales. The reader, even if reluctantly, allows himself to be pulled along.
An award-winning author, Last Orders won the Booker Prize in 1996; both Last Orders and Waterland have been turned into movies, Swift writes well, albeit at a slow pace.
Largely told in the voice of the elder boy Jack, it is the tale of a queer, troubled people. Luxton’s wife Vera dies of ovarian cancer, which Jack privately blames on his younger brother’s birth.
Luxton unceremoniously euthanises the family dog Luke, hinting to his younger son Tom that he hopes “someone would have the decency” to do the same for him someday. But he saves them from doing so by blowing his own brains out with a double-barrelled shotgun when only one round could have done the trick.
Jack marries Ellie, the girl next door, the child of old Jimmy Merrick of neighbouring Wescott Farm. The Merricks are themselves a family not free of the queerness assailing the Luxtons.
Ellie’s mother Alice just vanishes, yes, disappears, like a puff of smoke. Old Merrick expires soon after Luxton commits suicide.
With the two families intermarrying, it is a coming together of queers, somewhat.
Swift says earlier in the book that “you couldn’t really blame Tom Luxton, in fact, for seeking his future in the army”.
He sneaks out some night as the narrator Jack is listening and he doesn’t come back. Well, no, he does return – in a body bag from the war in Iraq.
That is where the book really begins – as Jack makes preparations to go to his brother’s funeral. Alone. His wife is adamant she’ll not go.
Having sold off their respective family farms when both their parents died and vanished, Jack and Ellie now own a caravan park boasting “32 white units”. They call it Lookout.
It is after Tom’s funeral that Jack, wishing his younger brother were here, for the umpteenth time in the novel, goes back home to a dinner and breakfast, vows not to eat.
How did Ellie’s father die? Jack confronts her. Did she put anything in his food to help the process?
Outraged, she storms out into inclement weather in the family Jeep Cherokee.
As she’s out dealing with the elements, he’s torn between suicide and taking his wife along into the next world. Suicide is messy, he reckons, and makes an unnecessary job for those left behind to clean up. So he’d take Ellie first.
He sits with the gun aimed at the door. The same gun his father used.
By the time Ellie bursts through the door, a vision of Tom – in full uniform, has already been standing at the door, blocking Jack’s target from view.
As she opens the door, he points a familiar object at her.
It unfurls to shield her from the rain.
He’d hidden the gun among the umbrellas at the umbrella stand and while Ellie takes a bath, he agonises over how to permanently get rid of the weapon and cartridges.
Well done, Swift. - Sunday Independent