On an autumn day in 2006, on the Isle of Wight, Jack Luxton, former Devon farmer and now the proprietor of a seaside caravan park, receives the news that his soldier brother Tom, not seen for years, has been killed in Iraq. For Jack and his wife Ellie this will have a potentially catastrophic impact. For Jack in particular it means a crucial journey—to receive his brother’s remains, but also into his own most secret, troubling memories and into the land of his and Ellie’s past.
MAKING AN ELEPHANT: WRITING FROM WITHIN by Graham Swift
Reviews
The Evening Standard
Nicholas Lezard
"The great thing about Swift is the way he takes the elements of melodrama but uses them in a calm, unostentatious and utterly plausible way. In doing so — and the meandering way his novels unfold, the carefully managed emergence of significant details, helps in this enormously — he gets to the heart of people."
26/05/2011
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The Sunday Times
Peter Kemp
"… Swift unobtrusively excels at capturing the unshowy stoicism of ordinary people coping with tragedy and the tactful decency with which others help them to do so."
29/05/2011
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The Independent
Boyd Tonkin
"Wish You Were Here burns with a sombre, steady rather than a pyrotechnic flame. Stick with it; stay close to its hearth. Like the gruff and saturnine folk within it, this novel takes some getting to know – but more than rewards the effort. As always, Swift refuses to impose a superior meta-language onto the flux of consciousness."
17/06/2011
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The Spectator
Anthony Cummins
"... he’s too keen to link agriculture and war. Basra ablaze puts Tom in mind of a cattle cull ... but Wish You Were Here seems more fatalistic than political: a howl, not an argument. That’s OK, because it is moving, engrossing, generally well put together, the stuff you want from a novel."
18/06/2011
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The Daily Telegraph
Leo Robson
"As ever, he exhibits not just a sense of place and community but a sense of time – historical time, seasonal time, diurnal time. Wish You Were Here is a deliberate novel, sparse, chilly, a little strait-laced, but also affecting and at times bitterly amusing ... Swift relies on the tried and trusted. Readers of his previous novels may find themselves groaning with familiarity ... There is one recurrent trait that will prove equally maddening to initiates and newcomers – his predilection for a mystery. "
20/06/2011
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The Times
Ruth Scurr
"Swift is expert at conveying the emotional contours of ordinary lives and embedding them in particular landscapes"
28/05/2011
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The Financial Times
Linda Grant
"Swift works hard to convey Jack’s inchoate sensations of grief, rage, homesickness and stubborn insistence on understanding the mystery of his father’s death and his brother’s running away, even his temporary descent into madness. But his plain unlyrical prose, so suited to Jack’s thinking, starts to induce numbness after a while. We spend too long inside his head. Still, Wish You Were Here fills a significant gap in contemporary fiction’s account of the England beyond the metropolitan borders."
03/06/2011
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The Daily Telegraph
Jane Shilling
"Farmers are not notoriously voluble, and Jack Luxton’s exposition of the traumas of his past unfolds in the affectless monotone of extreme trauma. More puzzlingly, the interior monologues of the lesser characters ... share the same strangely muffled quality. The cumulative effect is, eventually, quite moving. But there are lengthy passages where some frivolous-minded readers may catch a faint whiff of the lurid agricultural misfortunes of Cold Comfort Farm."
31/05/2011
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The London Review of Books
Tim Parks
"Perhaps halfway through Wish You Were Here I wondered whether Swift was dressing a fine story in the wrong clothes. It is not only the obtrusive patterning of imagery and the loud mechanics of melodrama; there is also Jack’s remorseless lucubration. Here is a man of no special education, so much so that he is unfamiliar with the word ‘hypocrisy’, whose recall of events nevertheless involves, at every point, highly verbal and nicely nuanced distinctions of behaviour and motivation."
02/06/2011
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The Guardian
Carol Birch
"A probing but leisurely character study masquerading as a mystery, it is scattered awkwardly with irritating and heavy-handed hints of impending doom, auguring a repeat of the damp squib ending of Swift's last novel, Tomorrow. Fortunately, Wish You Were Here is a far better book ... This is not a book for impatient readers, for the characters scarcely come alive until nearly halfway through ... But it's a book which improves with retrospect. "
11/06/2011
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The Observer
Benjamin Markovits
"Part of the charm of Last Orders is that it captured the colourful and original banter of a certain class of people, which sustained and comforted them even in the face of their decline. There is very little banter in Wish You Were Here. There is much less talk generally and what there is suggests mostly the sadness of the "honest cliche". The new book is not only grimmer but less funny, and a little less vivid, too. All of which is a part of Swift's point, but what seems less successful is the plot he constructs to bring it home."
12/06/2011
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The Independent on Sunday
Susan Elkin
"... a great deal of Anita Brookner-style introspection ... there's plenty to move the reader, and Wish You Were Here is certainly compelling. On the other hand, I was uneasy with Swift's rather clumsy handling of narrative viewpoint, which should be seamless but isn't."
12/06/2011
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Times Literary Supplement
Clare Morgan
"Graham Swift's structuring of a thematically diverse and expansive story within a disturbed consciousness, is challenging to the reader, particularly in the opening sections ... The large themes and brilliantly evoked landscape threaten to undermine Swift's characterization ..."
17/06/2011
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The Literary Review
Toby Lichtig
"The author does well at capturing (and persevering with) his characters’ vernacular, their exploratory self-expression, their truncated inner worlds. Unfortunately, Swift is not afraid of being boring and his diligence is not always to his credit. Time spent in the company of the repressed can be just as frustrating in fiction as in life."
01/06/2011
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