Killed like animals

Wish You Were Here is Graham Swift’s ninth novel, and he adopts a trending topic among the literati, namely the ‘war on terror’. But he does so at a slant. Rather than the dinner-party debate staged by his contemporaries, Swift domesticates the war on terror within a very personal story of loss.

The novel centres around the death of Tom Luxton, a soldier in Iraq, and the effect it has on his elder brother, Jack. But Tom’s death is merely the trigger for a Proustian excess of memory, as Jack begins revisiting ‘all the things that had once been dead and buried’ including his mother’s death, his father’s suicide and Tom’s teenage escape flight from the suffocating restrictions of ‘agricultural ruin’ to the army.

It is an odd novel in many ways. While jammed with emotional incident, there is next to no plot. Instead, the tangles of memory continually boomerang back to Jack sitting on his bed, frozen with inaction. He remains there until the final pages of the novel. So too with Swift’s style. Pages are furnished with jumpy sentences often divorced from their subject or denied a main verb, all part of a larger aesthetic strategy as he colours his prose with rainbow slang: ‘natty’, ‘miffed’, ‘mooch’, ‘gone ballistic’, ‘loafed’. Such homely bric-a-brac is paired against the sticking-plaster euphemisms of ‘repatriation’ and ‘incident’, all taken from the official dictionary of slaughter.

These oddities find their proper context in Swift’s overall view of his medium. In a recent piece, Swift explained his modus operandi by drawing a distinction between reportage and the novel. Reportage, he claimed, concerns itself with the newsy and the fleetingly contemporary, whereas the novel approaches the same subjects through a different optic, ‘the long view’ he called it, ‘…human behaviour worked on by time’. Headlines and political language, in this formulation, are leavened by the slangy niceties of everyday life.

Thus, Wish You Were Here stakes all on character and the tortuous complexities of the kitchen-sink. But it has a hard time doing so locked within the sluggish restrictions of the third-person mode (a recurring complaint: see Benjamin Markovits and Susan Elkin). And Jack remains smudgy and indistinct as a character. Other novelists of Swift’s ilk get away with plot-lite novels by using the first-person, a beguiling voice to plaster over structural ruin. Swift unwisely denies himself any such get-out clause.

This matters because, by dividing the novel off from reportage, Swift creates in Jack a character wholly ‘disconnected’ from ‘the world at large’. Any talk of ‘global atmosphere’ or the ‘larger picture’ is off-stage. Compared to the richly layered work of Ian McEwan’s Saturday, perhaps the most successful war-on-terror novel of recent years, Swift’s offering appears more than usually myopic. By restricting his action to Jebb Farm and the Luxton caravan park on the Isle of Wight, Swift ring-fences his characters from their historical moment. Without McEwan’s metropolitan fizz, or the swashbuckle of a Martin Amis sentence (as in The Second Plane), character needs to do all the work. And, often dull and witless, Jack Luxton isn’t quite up to his protagonist status.