This is a terrific read.
Graham Swift is a multi-award winning author - for Waterlands (one of the outstanding post-war novels and a set text on the British school syllabus) and his novel Last Orders (which won the Booker Prize and was made into a film). His novels have been noted for their magic surreal quality, and Swift states he is most influenced by international authors.
The feeling for magic pervades this novel of two friends in 1958 Brighton. Jack Robbins has taken the stage name Jack Robinson, as compere of the Brighton Pier variety show for another summer, tap dancing his patter "as the red red robin goes bob bob bobbin' along" between acrobats and the "Mistress of Melody". He finds an opening for his army friend Ronnie, a budding magician, if he can find a pretty assistant. Enter Evie White, a seasoned chorine who looks a treat flashing her white plumes and distracting legs. Jack secures them a spot and they quickly become the star attraction. From this setting we learn about Ronnie, one of the many children evacuated from London to Oxfordshire during the bombing, far away from the slums he lived in with his charwoman mother. The couple who raised him as their own lived in a proper house that even has its own name, and Ronnie discovers the husband is on wartime hiatus from an unusual vocation -Magician. We follow Jack through his early days in variety, and learn he was right in seeing TV take over the business; and we also follow Evie, from her days in the chorus to a season of success with Ronnie - but something is amiss - as its now fifty years later, and Evie is 75.
Jack is no longer around, and fifty years ago what happened to Ronnie could not be explained.
A pleasure to read. A simple story that captures that summer forever, yet broad enough to encompass the history of three lives with effortless skill. Swift's writing flows smoothly, even repeating, and within 195 pages these characters live and breathe as people I know. Ronnie spends the summer inventing new tricks (...no - people play tricks - magicians do illusions) leading to the greatest of all in the last show of the summer. I really enjoyed this novel and found myself looking back to see how Swift pulled this off - the way one wonders how Ronnie pulled off his illusions.
Better to just enjoy, and not think about it too much.
2020 / Tradeback / 195 pages
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