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Summary
Summary
On an autumn day in 2006, on the Isle of Wight, Jack Luxton--once a Devon farmer, now the proprietor of a seaside caravan park--receives the news that his brother, Tom, not seen for years, has been killed in combat in Iraq. For Jack and his wife, Ellie, this will have unexpected, far-reaching effects. For Jack in particular it means a crucial journey: to receive his brother's remains and to confront his most secret, troubling memories.
A hauntingly intimate, deeply compassionate story about things that touch and test our human core, Wish You Were Here also looks, inevitably, to a wider, afflicted world. Moving toward a fiercely suspenseful climax, it brilliantly transforms the stuff of headlines into heart-wrenching personal truth.
Author Notes
British novelist Graham Swift was born in London on May 4, 1949. He attended Cambridge University and York University.
Swift has written five novels, including Waterland.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Swift's stunning new novel (after Light of Day) begins with deceptive slowness, detailing the lives of Jack and Ellie, the English husband-and-wife proprietors of a trailer park on the Isle of Wight. Jack and his brother Tom grew up on a dairy farm, but after mad cow disease decimates the livestock, their father commits suicide and the brothers grow apart-Tom enlists and goes off to fight in Iraq, while Jack and Ellie built a happy, if quiet, existence. But when a letter from the Ministry of Defence arrives-addressed to the old farm and rerouted "by someone with a long memory" to the Isle of Wight-Jack learns that the burden of repatriating his brother's remains has fallen on his shoulders, a responsibility that will cause Jack to confront the complexities of "life and all its knowledge," and the sheltering peace of death. Swift (Last Orders) creates an elegant rawness with language that carries the reader through several layers of Jack's consciousness at once-his lonely past, his uncertain future, and the ways in which his father and his brother both refuse to leave him alone, despite how long they've been gone. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Jack meant it when he wrote, Wish you were here, on a postcard to Ellie, the girl who lived on the adjacent Devon family farm, a seemingly banal sentiment that gains gravitas as this subtly powerful novel unfolds. A stoic adolescent close to his mother and protective of his younger, quicksilver brother, Tom, Jack became a large man of few words. He toughed it out with his irascible father after his mother died, the mad-cow catastrophe plunged their dairy farm into hopeless debt, and Tom ran off to join the army. Years later, Jack and Ellie are living on the Isle of Wight when Jack learns that Tom has been killed in Iraq by a roadside bomb, a loss that hits their house-of-cards marriage with percussive force. Booker Prize winner Swift is masterful in his penetrating evocation of the land Jack loves, the many languages a body can speak, and the cavernous unknown concealed beneath apparent intimacy. Brilliantly illuminating the wounded psyches of his characters, circling back to corral the secrets of the past while finding the timeless core within present conflicts, and consummately infusing this gorgeously empathic tale with breath-holding suspense, Swift tests ancient convictions about birthright, nature, love, heroism, war, death, and the covenant of grief. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Supported by vigorous promotion, Swift's first novel in five years may well rekindle the interest created by his Booker-winning Tomorrow and Booker-shortlisted Waterland.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE intersection of the global and the nearly indetectable, even subatomic, realms of the personal is territory Graham Swift maps with particular acuity. His sense of leverage, and of the vectors of connection between, say, the way a woman sits in a car on the Isle of Wight and the horror of Sept. 11, is exquisite. From his early novel "Waterland" (which interweaves a marriage, a kidnapping, 300 years of the history of the Fens and the ways of the eel) to the novel that won him the Booker Prize, "Last Orders" (which tracks the spoken and unspoken connections among a group of elderly World War II veterans gathered in a pub), Swift has used extraordinarily subtle means to talk about the way we live now and how it's infused not only with the way we lived then but with the way other people lived, and live. He has what might be described as an old-fashioned humanist sensibility; the unearthing of buried emotion, and the consequences of that unearthing, is his métier. Jamesian in sensibility and to some degree in style, he finds tragedy in the most ordinary conversation, redemption in the way one character offers another an umbrella. You forget how piercing this sort of thing can be until you see Swift doing it so well, and with such patience. The depth of field in a Swift novel, thematically and emotionally, is vast. At his best, he suggests that looking intently at the smallest, most mundane thing can yield a glimpse into the meaning of life. In "Wish You Were Here," Swift trains, this searching, compassionate gaze on a middle-aged couple, Jack and Ellie, who run a caravan park on the Isle of Wight. It's 2006. Both Jack and Ellie are the children of local dairymen, although the region's dairy farms are long since defunct, in no small part because of the epidemic of mad cow disease that devastated the industry. Jack and Ellie have no children and the members of their extended families are mostly long dead, except for Jack's brother, Tom, a soldier in Iraq who, as Jack learns in the opening pages, has just died there. It falls to Jack to receive his brother's remains - a process known as "repatriation" - and attend a ceremony at an air base in Oxfordshire, followed by a private burial in Devon. As this journey unfolds, the novel also excavates the respective pasts of Jack and Ellie with particular attention to the suicide of Jack's father after a cancer diagnosis and the ruination of his farm. Working also, as it were, vertically, the novel tracks the way Tom's death begins to undo his brother, first slowly, then very quickly bringing him to an unforeseen inner brink, a terrible shattering. Causality, in Swift's hands, is buried, unpredictable; it runs through people and events in the odd way a water leak can move through a house, running down walls seemingly far removed from the source. Guns go off in the novel; there are weddings; there are funerals; there are inquests and revelations; hearts break; smoke rises from pyres. But none of these events happen in quite the order, or for the reasons, you would expect. Moving gracefully and without fanfare among multiple points of view, the novel might be said to evoke a collective psychic wound that is expressed variously in various characters, simultaneously drawing people together and driving them irretrievably apart, destroying some lives and saving others according to its own unknowable agency. Among the most beautifully made of Swift's creations is the spectral, half-living, half-dead Tom, a ghost who haunts the novel and everyone in it, but differently according to their different needs for, feelings toward and uses of him. Indeed, Tom is something between a ghost and a dream, or perhaps a dream of a ghost, who appears according to the sensibility of the dreamer, including Tom himself. He isn't anything as simple as a renegade or a black sheep; he isn't a lost soul; he doesn't possess a secret involving love or money or violence that would explain his power. 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After the farms died, some of their owners opened small businesses; some went to the cities; others joined the army. Like Annie Proulx, Swift traces what happens to communities of people who once lived on and by the land, but no longer can. Exiled in modern life, they're perpetually haunted by alternate selves, tied and obligated to structures that no longer exist. Standing by Tom's coffin, Jack wonders where his ghost has gone, then reflects: "No, Tom was with him, here in this box. All there was of Tom was here. He felt, though he couldn't see Tom, couldn't hear him, couldn't see the signaling flickers in his face, that they were like two people waiting for something together, for the next thing to happen, and neither of them was sure who should make the first move, though it was foolish perhaps to delay." In one of Swift's most daring moves - and I won't spoil it, since it closes all the novel's narrative and thematic loops - Tom even becomes a strange sort of hero, although at a moment and in a manner far removed from the battlefields of Iraq. GIVEN this abundance of subtlety, tenderness and fluid prose, most readers will be able to adapt to the novel's pace, which is at times so measured, so defined by indirect action, that it can feel a bit as if one were watching an epic produced as a shadow play. Long blocks of expository text are often only briefly interrupted by one character saying something to another like, "I think we'd better cancel St. Lucia," which the astute reader is meant to understand as a devastating statement. One might, every now and then, be excused for wishing Swift coufd get to the point a little less discreetly and with less use of the past perfect tense. The teacups may be rattling because of an earthquake, but would it be so tacky to concentrate on the earthquake now and then, rather than the trembling china? However, asking such a crass question is probably like asking if Bach's cello suites might be improved with a little backbeat. They wouldn't, and such an addition would drown out the exquisite music. Swift's empathic, far-reaching, ever so slightly eccentric melancholy is gorgeous just as it is. Swift traces what happens to communities of people who once lived on and by the land, but no longer can. Stacey D'Erasmo's most recent novel is "The Sky Below."
Guardian Review
The story of a dreadful day of catharsis in the life of a resolutely ordinary man, Swift's ninth novel begins with remembered images of funeral pyres of burning cattle and the collapse of the twin towers. "There is no end to madness," thinks Jack Luxton, sitting alone in his bedroom, looking out over the rain-lashed caravan site, now closed for winter, that he has run for the past 10 years with his wife, Ellie. This dark, restrained family drama takes us back to a time when Jack and Ellie were diffident childhood sweethearts growing up on neighbouring farms. The land, farmed by Luxtons for nearly 400 years, is sacred. But now it has gone, ruined by "the war with the cow disease", and Jack is "the soft-living proprietor of a caravan site". Not a book for impatient readers, it improves in retrospect as Swift circles round themes, characters and events, each circuit revealing a little more as the past explodes like a bomb in the midst of a relationship that goes back further than either party can remember. - Carol Birch The story of a dreadful day of catharsis in the life of a resolutely ordinary man, Swift's ninth novel begins with remembered images of funeral pyres of burning cattle and the collapse of the twin towers. "There is no end to madness," thinks Jack Luxton, sitting alone in his bedroom, looking out over the rain-lashed caravan site, now closed... - Carol Birch.
Kirkus Review
Last Orders, 1996, etc.), such a perspective on the past is in serious need of correction, which this novel provides in a subtly virtuosic and surprisingly suspenseful manner. It's a sign of Swift's literary alchemy that he gleans so much emotional and thematic richness from such deceptively common stock. Jack and Ellie have grown up together in the British farm country, and their marriage is practically inevitable once both are on their own. Jack's mother died when he was a boy; Ellie's left home for another man. Jack's brother, Tom, eight years younger but in many ways more worldly and self-assertive, forsakes the farm life to join the army as soon as he can. The fathers of Jack and Ellie both die; Tom remains out of contact for more than a decade. At Ellie's insistence, they sell their property in order to run a seaside vacation park she has inherited. Every winter the childless couple takes a Caribbean vacation. When Tom dies in Iraq, Jack must deal with the arrangements. He cancels the annual vacation and his marriage all but unravels. The minister who had handled the funeral of Jack's father and now his brother knows that the eulogy needs to be "as little and simple as possibleas simple as possible being really the essence of the thing." Swift somehow cuts to the essence of both a family's legacy and the modern malaise through the reticent Jack, who comes to terms with the realization that "all the things that had once been dead and buried had come back again."Profound empathy and understated eloquence mark a novel so artfully nuanced that the last few pages send the reader back to the first few, with fresh understanding. ]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
This perfectly titled novel is about longing for the people in our lives who have died. Taking place over just a few days, it focuses on Jack Luxton's journey to retrieve the remains of his brother Tom, a soldier who died in Iraq. The brothers grew up on a farm in the British countryside, and hovering over the story is the specter of mad cow disease on one end and terror (both political and personal) on the other. Madness and terror certainly infect Jack, who has suffered the loss of nearly everyone he loves. The question that propels the action is whether he will ultimately destroy himself as well. Like Swift's Waterland, this book explores the ways the past haunts us, and, like his Booker Prize-winning Last Orders, it uses a death as a provocation for the examination of self and country. VERDICT Swift has written a slow-moving but powerful novel about the struggle to advance beyond grief and despair and to come to grips with the inevitability of change. Recommended for fans of Ian McEwan, Michael Ondaatje, and Kazuo Ishiguro, authors with a similar method of slowly developing an intense interior narrative. [See Prepub Alert, 9/30/11.]-Evelyn Beck, Piedmont Technical Coll., Greenwood, SC (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1 There is no end to madness, Jack thinks, once it takes hold. Hadn't those experts said it could take years before it flared up in human beings? So, it had flared up now in him and Ellie. Sixty-five head of healthy-seeming cattle that finally succumbed to the rushed-through culling order, leaving a silence and emptiness as hollow as the morning Mum died, and the small angry wisp of a thought floating in it: Well, they'd better be right, those experts, it had better damn well flare up some day or this will have been a whole load of grief for nothing. So then. Healthy cattle. Sound of limb and udder and hoof--and mind. "Not one of them mad as far as I ever saw," Dad had said, as if it was the start of one of his rare jokes and his face would crack into a smile to prove it. But his face had looked like simply cracking anyway and staying cracked, and the words he might have said, by way of a punchline, never left his lips, though Jack thinks now that he heard them. Or it was his own silent joke to himself. Or it's the joke he's only arrived at now: "We must be the mad ones." And if ever there was a time when Jack's dad might have put his two arms round his two sons, that was it. His arms were certainly long enough, even for his sons' big shoulders--both brothers out of the same large Luxton mould, though with all of eight years between them. Tom would have been fifteen then, but growing fast. And Jack, though it was a fact he sometimes wished to hide, even to reverse, already had a clear inch over his father. The three of them had stood there, like the only life left, in the yard at Jebb Farm. But Michael Luxton hadn't put his arms round his two sons. He'd done what he'd begun to do, occasionally, only after his wife's death. He'd looked hard at his feet, at the ground he was standing on, and spat. And Jack, who long ago took his last look at that yard, looks now from an upstairs window at a grey sea, at a sky full of wind-driven rain, but sees for a moment only smoke and fire. Sixty-five head of cattle. Or, to reckon it another way (and never mind the promised compensation): ruin. Ruin, at some point in the not-so-distant future, the ruin that had been creeping up on them anyway since Vera Luxton had died. Cattle going mad all over England. Or being shoved by the hundred into incinerators for the fear and the risk of it. Who would have imagined it? Who would have dreamed it? But cattle aren't people, that's a fact. And when trouble comes your way, at least you might think, though it's small comfort and precious little help: Well, we've had our turn now, our share. But years later, right here in this seaside cottage, Jack had switched on the TV and said, "Ellie, come and look at this. Come and look, quick." It was the big pyre at Roak Moor, back in Devon. Thousands of stacked-up cattle, thousands more lying rotting in fields. The thing was burning day and night. The smoke would surely have been visible, over the far hills, from Jebb. Not to mention the smell being carried on the wind. And someone on the TV--another of those experts--was saying that burning these cattle might still release into the air significant amounts of the undetected agent of BSE. Though it was ten years on, and this time the burnings were for foot-and-mouth. Which people weren't known to get. Yet. "Well, Jack," Ellie had said, stroking the back of his neck, "did we make a good move? Or did we make a good move?" But he'd needed to resist the strange, opposite feeling: that he should have been there, back at Jebb, in the thick of it; it was his proper place. BSE, then foot-and-mouth. What would have been the odds? Those TV pictures had looked like scenes from hell. Flames leaping up into the night. Even so, cattle aren't people. Just a few months later Jack had turned on the telly once again and called to Ellie to come and look, as people must have been calling out, all over the world, to whoever was in the next room, "Drop what you're doing and come and look at this." More smoke. Not over familiar, remembered hills, and even on the far side of the world. Though Jack's first thought--or perhaps his second--had been the somehow entirely necessary and appropriate one: Well, we should be all right here. Here at the bottom of the Isle of Wight. And while the TV had seemed to struggle with its own confusion and repeated again and again, as if they might not be true, the same astonishing sequences, he'd stepped outside to look down at the site, as if half expecting everything to have vanished. Thirty-two white units. All still there. And among them, on the grass, a few idle and perhaps still-ignorant human sprinkles. But inside each caravan was a television, and some of them must be switched on. The word must be spreading. In the Ship, in the Sands Cafe, it must be spreading. It was early September--late season--but the middle of a beautiful, clear, Indian-summer day, the sea a smooth, smiling blue. Until now at least, they would all have been congratulating themselves on having picked a perfect week. He'd felt a surge of helpless responsibility, of protectiveness. He was in charge. What should he do--go down and calm them? In case they were panicking. Tell them it was all right? Tell them it was all right just to carry on their holidays, that was what they'd come for and had paid for and they shouldn't let this spoil things, they should carry on enjoying themselves. But his next thought--though perhaps it had really been his first and he'd pushed it aside, and it was less a thought maybe than a cold, clammy premonition--was: what might this mean for Tom? He looks now at that same view from the bedroom window of Lookout Cottage, though the weather's neither sunny nor calm. Clouds are charging over Holn Head. A November gale is careering up the Channel. The sea, white flecks in its greyness, seems to be travelling in a body from right to left, west to east, as if some retreat is going on. Rain stings the glass in front of him. Ellie has been gone for over an hour--this weather yet to unleash itself when she left. She could be sitting out the storm somewhere, pulled up in the wind-rocked Cherokee. Reconsidering her options, perhaps. Or she could have done already exactly what she said she'd do, and be returning, having to take it slowly, headlights on in the blinding rain. Or returning--who knows?--behind a police car, with not just its headlights on, but its blue light flashing. Reconsidering her options? But she made the move and said the words. The situation is plain to him now, and despite the blurring wind and rain, Jack's mind is really quite clear. She had her own set of keys, of course. All she had to do was grab her handbag and walk out the door, but she might have remembered another set of keys that Jack certainly hasn't forgotten. Has it occurred to her, even now? Ellie who was usually the one who thought things through, and him the slowcoach. "Ellie," Jack thinks. "My Ellie." He's already taken the shotgun from the cabinet downstairs--the keys are in the lock--and brought it up here. It's lying, loaded, on the bed behind him, on the white duvet. For good measure he has a box of twenty-five cartridges (some already in his pocket), in case of police cars, in case of mishaps. It's the first time, Jack thinks, that he's ever put a gun on a bed, let alone theirs, and that, by itself, has to mean something. As he peers through the window he can feel the weight of the gun behind him, making a dent in the duvet as if it might be some small, sleeping body. Well, one way or another, they'd never gone down the road of children. There isn't, now, that complication. He's definitely the last of the Luxtons. There's only one final complication--it involves Ellie--and he's thought that through too, seriously and carefully. Which is why he's up here, at this rain-lashed window, from where he has the best view of the narrow, twisting road, Beacon Hill, which has no other purpose these days than to lead to this cottage. So he'll be alerted. So he'll be able to see, just a little sooner than from downstairs, the dark-blue roof, above the high bank, then the nose of the Cherokee as it takes the first, tight, ascending bend, past the old chapel. The Cherokee that's done so much hard journeying in these last three days. The road below him, running with water, seems to slither. Of course, she might not return at all. Another option, and one she might be seriously contemplating. Though where the hell else does she have to go to? It's all gone mad, Jack thinks, but part of him has never felt saner. Rain blurs the window, but he looks through it at the rows of buffeted caravans in the middle distance to the right, beyond the spur of land that slopes down beneath him to the low mass of the Head. All empty now, of course, for the winter. "Well, at least this has happened in the off season." Ellie's words, and just for a shameful instant it had been his own secret flicker of a thought as well. He looks at the caravans and even now feels their tug, like the tug of the wind on their own thin, juddering frames. Thirty-two trembling units. To the left, the locked site office, the laundrette, the empty shop--grille down, window boarded. The gated entrance-way off the Sands End road, the sign above it swinging. Even now, especially now, he feels the tug. The Lookout Caravan Park, named after this cottage (or two knocked into one), in turn named after its former use. He feels, himself now, like some desperate coastguard. Ellie had said they should change the name from the Sands. He'd said they should keep it, for the good will and the continuity. And so they had, for a year. But Ellie was all for them making their own mark and wiping out what was past. There must be no end of caravan sites called the Sands, she'd said, but the Lookout would stand out. It could work two ways, he'd said, "Lookout"--attempting another of those solemn-faced jokes of the kind his father once made. Ellie had shrugged. So, didn't he like the name of the cottage? It wasn't the name they'd given it, after all. Lookout Cottage (usually known as just "The Lookout"). They could always change the name of the cottage. Ellie was all for change. She was his wife now. She'd laughed--she'd changed her name to Luxton. But they hadn't. Perhaps they should have done. And before the new season began, for the sake of uniformity but also novelty, and because Ellie thought it sounded better than the Sands, the site had become, on the letterhead and the brochure and on the sign over the gate, as well as in plain fact, the Lookout Park. And it was lookout time now all right. Excerpted from Wish You Were Here by Graham Swift All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
