Wish You Were Here

Why is Jack Luxton sitting on a bed with a loaded shotgun, waiting for his wife, Ellie, to come home? It takes author Graham Swift a long while to reveal the details. Wish You Were Here is about attachment to the land, to tradition and to family. It is about death: dead cows, dead soldiers, dead family. It is about loss. Jack Luxton, Devon farmer turned trailer park owner, is on his way to repatriate the body of his brother and then back to his home town to see him buried. Against a backdrop of mad cow disease, foot and mouth disease, the World Trade Centre attacks and the war in Iraq he ruminates on the events that have brought him here. Swift's pace is actually not so swift and at times I found myself impatient, waiting for the other shoe to drop, but in the end the calm and steady pace of the story makes it all the more appealing. The passages describing his close relationship with his mother who died too young, the death of his dear dog, his love for his younger brother who left home to join the army as soon as he was old enough are touchingly tender.

What drives the novel is our curiosity about what motivates large, inarticulate, emotionally limited Jack to hole up in his house with a gun waiting for his wife and/or police. Nothing much, as it turns out.

Wish You Were Here explores the powerful themes of violence and loss in a very quiet way and if the ending seems anti-climactic it's because it's best that way.