Here We Are by Graham Swift review – a tale of magic, love and loss

The story unfolds as if we’re watching it through glass. Evie White, widow of the actor Jack Robbins, goes out for lunch on the first anniversary of her husband’s death. Then she returns home, walks into the garden where Jack’s ashes were scattered, and suddenly sees all the cobwebs glittering in the dew around her, before heading back inside and upstairs to sleep. What she remembers in the course of this slight day, though, is a story that spans half a century, an account of the great vanishing act of life, which is as light and brilliant as the cobwebs in the garden.

Fifty years before, Evie was an assistant to magician Ronnie Deane, known on stage as the Great Pablo. She was also engaged to him; Jack was the compere who introduced Pablo and Evie to the crowd on Brighton Pier each evening, before running round to the back of the audience to watch the show. Graham Swift’s new novel is really Ronnie’s story. It follows his evacuation during the blitz from east London to an Oxfordshire house where he was taught magic; his alienation when he returns home and finds that it’s home no longer; his national service and path into performing with Evie and Jack. At the novel’s climax, Swift gives us a description of Ronnie’s act which, because he’s made us wait for it, is as enthralling as anything that will be published this year.

Somewhere in the narrative journey, as if by sleight of hand, Evie’s affections transfer from Ronnie to Jack, Ronnie pulls a disappearing act, and the rest of the 20th century passes in a couple of dreamlike steps. Swift has given us a variation on the theme of “rosebud” – a Citizen Kane story about how the defining motifs of a life can emerge very early, then resonate like a secret through the remaining years, even though the thing that gave rise to them (in Ronnie’s case, his time at the Oxfordshire house Evergrene) may seem ever so ordinary to anyone else.

With its focus on the marginalised suburban underbelly of England, the novel might have been written by William Trevor (I can offer no higher praise), while in Jack, Swift conjures the ghost of John Osborne’s showman Archie Rice in The Entertainer, which used music hall to talk about the state of the nation. That metaphor is echoed here, as Swift asks us to read the postwar story of the country as a kind of trick, now fading: only a memory being relived, the same old act watched on TV, no longer seen live at the end of the pier.

The book wonderfully captures the experience of evacuation during the second world war, which offers a lens through which to study the relationship between growing up and displacement. It’s also a profoundly important story to tell in its own right: a better understanding of what this fracturing of so many childhoods did to people can help us to more clearly understand the latter half of the 20th century. Just last year, reading the oral historian Padmini Broomfield’s interviews with former workers at the Ford factory in Southampton, I encountered a man who still wept when he talked about the beautiful house he was sent to when he was evacuated. My grandmother’s favourite story about the evacuees her family took in was that she found them staring at a snail once, one girl saying to the other: “Cor, look at ’is ’oorns!” We’ve all heard the old cliche about cockneys never having seen a cow – but some of them hadn’t even seen a snail before.

I am digressing from Here We Are, but that’s the thing about this novel: it has an archetypal quality, reminiscent of a folktale, that encourages the reader to think of the vanished stories their own family histories might reveal. I don’t know quite how Swift does it – the book is light, perhaps slight, and the story is all told at one or two removes so that it reads as though it’s happening in the next room. And yet it’s a magical piece of writing: the work of a novelist on scintillating form.

• Barney Norris’s latest novel is The Vanishing Hours (Doubleday). Here We Are is published by Simon & Schuster (RRP £14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15.