Wish you were here

I waited at least four years for Wish you were here by Graham Swift. At least. I ordered it from my local bookshop, which called me a couple of days later saying it was out of print, but would be reprinted in a new edition. Would I like to be added to the waiting list? I would like that. I wrote about this experience in 2017, when Swift was number two on my list of 'new' authors. At least a year later I was in said bookshop collecting another title, when I realised I'd never heard about this book again. They checked; it was still out of print. The new edition somehow never came into being. So I put the novel on my wish list for birthdays and other celebrations and forgot all about it, until last Christmas when it suddenly came to me, wrapped up and innocent as if I could have just gotten it all that time ago.

The blurb tells us that Wish you were here works towards a "fiercely suspenseful climax", which is very true, but sadly the road towards that climax takes almost as long as it took me to actually lay hands on the book. It is slow going, this story about Jack Luxton and his dealings with mad cow disease, dying parents, an absent brother, a farm in debt and a new life on a caravan park. Slow going for a novel that actually takes place in a couple of minutes, half an hour at the most. All the rest is flashbacks.

So it took a long time to get into, but when the novel finally gripped me, I was completely captivated. It would never be the sort of novel I can read in one go; too many vivid descriptions of death and destruction which have to sink down in my mind before I can read on, but the last half of it was read in a couple of days, in contrast to the first half taking at least a month. It caught me in the end.

The language is beautiful, of course. Graham Swift is one of my favourite writers in that regard. You can feel the wind and rain lashing against a window, you can feel the wood of a casket beneath your fingers. The build up and plot are good too. Its not just Jack's story, for at the moments you really need to get the point of view from one of the other characters, Swift gives you an insight into their world, which is often radically different from what Jack assumes. 

However, I didn't find Jack or Ellie or any of the other main characters sympathetic in any way. I didn't really like them, personally. Maybe because I couldn't understand why they acted the way they did, even with all their experiences and emotions laid bare. Maybe because their reality is just so far removed from my own. But even in that final, captivation climax, when you cannot rip through the pages fast enough to find out what was going to happen, a large part of me mostly wanted to know the events, I wasn't really rooting for anyone.

So overall, a beautiful novel. A bit too long, maybe, with 430 pages in my edition. The pace could have picked up a bit sooner, the characters may have been a bit more accessible. But these are minor flaws in an otherwise great novel, with which I've officially 'rediscovered' Graham Swift, four years later than anticipated, as a great British author. Let's hope it doesn't take another four years until I read his next novel.