Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
Audible sample Sample
Here We Are: A novel Hardcover – September 22, 2020
Purchase options and add-ons
It is 1959 in Brighton, England, and the theater at the end of the famous pier is having its best summer season in years. Ronnie, a brilliant young magician, and Evie, his dazzling assistant, are top of the bill, drawing a full house every night. And Jack is everyone’s favorite master of ceremonies, holding the whole show together. But as the summer progresses, the drama among the three begins to overshadow their success onstage, setting in motion events that will reshape their lives. Vividly realized, tenderly comic, and quietly shattering, Here We Are is a masterly work of literary magic.
- Print length208 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherKnopf
- Publication dateSeptember 22, 2020
- Dimensions5.49 x 0.88 x 7.78 inches
- ISBN-10052565805X
- ISBN-13978-0525658054
Frequently bought together
Customers who viewed this item also viewed
Editorial Reviews
Review
“A beautiful new novel . . . Here We Are is fiction for the thinking person, for the reader who notices details and patterns. It is also a strangely emotional work . . . And this book itself is a work of magic: neither trick nor illusion, but a flash of truth . . . Rather in the manner of James Joyce or Virginia Woolf, Swift composes his fiction like a musical composition. Like them too, he is intently concerned with history: the forward and backward movement of individual lives in time, played out against the backdrop of seismic social change.” —Brooke Allen, Wall Street Journal
“A paragon of the magic of compressed narration . . . Don’t be fooled by the deceptive simplicity of Here We Are, which at first appears to be a light little story about a love triangle between three variety show performers in seaside Brighton, England in 1959 [but] turns out to be about nothing less than life’s frequently baffling illusions and transformations . . . Once again, Swift has demonstrated wizardry in his ability to conjure magic out of ordinary lives.” —Heller McAlpin, NPR
“Swift’s closing account of a mundane world momentarily pierced by a shaft of numinous mystery is magnificent. It is what he did so brilliantly in Waterland . . . How delightful it is, then, to see a glimpse of that other Graham Swift—flamboyant, luxurious, outrageous even—back before our very eyes.” —Kathryn Hughes, New York Times Book Review
“Quietly brilliant . . . A powerful study of fame, identity, and lost love . . . Swift has worked his magic to produce a novel fueled by, and consequently alive with, creative brilliance and emotional intensity.” —Malcolm Forbes, Minneapolis Star-Tribune
“A jewel of a novel . . . Saturated with images and metaphors that recur like melodies . . . Swift’s brief, magical tale demonstrates one more brilliant example of his talent for pulling universal themes out of the hats of ordinary lives.” —Publishers Weekly (starred)
“Deeply moving . . . [Written] in the crisp, eloquently understated prose that has been a hallmark of Swift’s award-winning career.” —Bill Ott, Booklist (starred)
“A marvellous tale of post-war love and magic . . . Swift brings his old lyricism to a new landscape . . . Sensuous . . . A delight.” —Nikhil Krishnan, Daily Telegraph
“Some writers are like old friends—you can lose touch with their work and pick up right where you left off . . . Brilliant . . . This is a beautiful, gentle, intricate novella, the kind of book that stays with you despite not appearing to do anything particularly new or special. In fact, perhaps that’s what makes it so very good: Here We Are smuggles within the pages of a seemingly commonplace tale depths of emotion and narrative complexity that take the breath away.” —Alex Preston, The Observer
“A magical piece of writing: the work of a novelist on scintillating form . . . As enthralling as anything that will be published this year . . . The book wonderfully captures the experience of evacuation during the second world war. It’s also a profoundly important story to tell in its own right . . . I don’t know quite how Swift does it.” —Barney Norris, The Guardian
“The book’s power comes precisely from the fact that it performs its magic in front of your eyes, leaving nowhere to hide . . . You wonder how he does it.” —Oliver Hurst, Financial Times
“A haunting read . . . Pitch-perfect . . . The compactly brilliant Mothering Sunday watched belated aftereffects of the First World War painfully working themselves out in 1924. A kind of companion piece, Here We Are watches consequences of the Second World War still cruelly making their presence felt . . . With a wizardry of his own, Swift conjures up an about-to-disappear little world and turns it into something of wider resonance.” —Peter Kemp, The Sunday Times
“Here We Are is a subtle portrait of a vanished world . . . Moving.” —Martin Chilton, The Independent
“Master novelist Swift invites readers to see parallels between the tricks he is pulling and the magic act that is the ostensible subject of his novel. Or is it? As Swift writes of a magician and the assistant to whom he is betrothed, ‘The act had become a fluid phenomenon, yet full of a thrilling tension. You never knew what might happen next. This in itself became part of the attraction.’” —Kirkus Reviews
“Graham Swift is one of Britain’s finest and most understated writers . . . None of his earlier books strays as deeply into the farther realms of the extraordinary as this latest work . . . Here We Are is not a fat novel, but it is a richly rewarding one, every line playing its part. The variety of voices and its historical and emotional reach are so finely entwined, it is as perfect and smooth as an egg. Passages leap out all the time, demanding to be reread, or committed to memory . . . Swift gives a lesson in sleight of hand, artistic control and the gear-changes involved in the slow and startling reveal . . . It is perhaps too simple to say that Swift creates a form of fictional magic, but what he can do with a page is out of the ordinary, far beyond most mortals’ ken.” —Rosemary Goring, The Herald (Scotland)
“Swift has been turning out literature of wit, intelligence and insight for a remarkable 40 years [and] has never lost his footing . . . Here We Are is a welcome addition to a proud legacy.” —Jane Graham, Big Issue
“A quietly devastating, magical novel . . . Swift’s prose is restrained but emotionally charged . . . Mothering Sunday was quite possibly the loveliest book I’ve ever read. Here We Are is in elegiac mode once more.” —Francesca Carington, The Telegraph
“Graham Swift has never written anything that wasn’t interesting and pleasing. He is powerful in an always understated way.” —Alan Massie, The Scotsman
Australia:
“A short, word-perfect novel . . . Graham Swift is the quiet master of fiction, the magic of fiction, and in Here We Are, he returns us again to that ‘tilt of the world,’ the subject of all his novels, variations on the workings of class and history, the great changes and losses, the power of events accumulating, a single event that lives on in absence.” —Drusilla Modjeska, Sydney Morning Herald
“An ethereal foray into the vanishing world of the magician . . . Beautiful, breathtaking and heart-wrenching.” —Australian Women’s Weekly
Germany:
“A magical book and great storytelling art.” —Berliner Zeitung
“With his book Mothering Sunday Graham Swift reached a high plateau of storytelling art . . . His new novel Here We Are is on the same high plateau.” —Süddeutsche Zeitung
“Graham Swift remains the master of the literary twinkling of an eye. Here We Are proves that deep seriousness and the greatest possible lightness can go together.” —Abendzeitung
“The beauty of Graham Swift’s books is that he gives you what you want without you knowing that you wanted it. How does he achieve this magical feat? It remains his secret. What a magician.” —Tagesspiegel
“With a few masterly strokes Swift evokes the privations of a wartime and post-war age . . . The world of ‘variety,’ of magic, of stage lights seems like a counter-world . . . but life, especially in these years, is both sweet and bitter . . . So Graham Swift relates in his quiet, beautiful and moving novel.” —Frankfurter Rundschau
“From the light-footed world of show business he produces a story of depth.” —WDR
“Graham Swift tells this story without any flamboyance of effect, yet it reverberates for days all the more. The question is always how do we become who we are? What can a soul undergo?” —NDR
“The greatest magician, there is no doubt about it, is Graham Swift himself.” —Deutschlandfunk Kultur
Austria:
“Swift is a master of the nuance, the hint, of what remains unsaid. In this respect a novel about magic and illusion seems exactly the right terrain for him . . . Swift’s novel itself has something magical about it, an enormous force that grows from the fact that so much is understated . . . Once again he proves that he is one of the great conjurers of contemporary literature.” —Wiener Zeitung
“What flows from the British writer’s pen is pure magic.” —Kleine Zeitung
Switzerland:
“Graham Swift takes on the trickery of the entertainment world for his magical storytelling, a virtuoso leading us into glittery deceptive zones and revealing a completely different side to the great British novelist.” —Neue Zürcher Zeitung
Netherlands:
“Swift employs an unadorned but intense, musical prose that bathes the events described in an elusive gleam . . . Not for the first time Graham Swift captures the magic and mystery of ‘ordinary’ lives.” —Het Parool
“Graham Swift gives you the feeling of entering another’s life. How does he do it? I wonder this every time after reading a book by Graham Swift. You read it, you’re close to it, yet you don’t see how he does it. Swift’s new novel Here We Areis about an illusionist—so fitting for a writer whose secret you just can’t unravel.” —Trouw
Belgium:
“The author knows, as always, how to render the human condition with a light touch . . . to catch the magic of life in words, that is an undertaking Graham Swift has mastered like no one else.” —De Telegraaf
“A masterpiece of nuance and literary art.” —BRF
“With a love story set in the variety-theatre world of post-war England, Graham Swift once again proves his skills as a literary acrobat who knows how to capture the abiding sadness of human existence in elegantly executed leaps of time and shifts of perspective. Swift has never been afraid of big themes like love and grief, but he treats them ever more delicately. The multi-award-winning writer, a craftsman who has nothing to prove, but still a lot to tell, delivers pure reading pleasure.” —Humo
Sweden:
“With just a few pen strokes Graham Swift gives things a presence.” —Dagens Nyheter
“In Here We Are everything is concentrated on only the most essential . . . Swift lets us get close to three characters one by one, so that they stay extraordinarily alive in the mind even after the book is finished.” —Sydsvenskan
“A book that shines with magic . . . An extremely readable novel, skillfully narrated and raising many fundamental questions without feeling artificial or contrived.” —Alba-nu
“A masterfully compressed triangular drama. Swift’s ability to enter three people’s entire lives in so few pages, deftly shifting between different points of view and at the same time giving the reader a palpable sense of the fragility of existence itself is narrative art of the highest order . . . His previous novel Mothering Sunday was hailed unanimously by critics. In its seemingly effortless composition Here We Are echoes that novel. Here too is the ability of great literature to move us by capturing the transience of life.” —Barometern
“A masterly magic novel.” —Kristianstadsbladet
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
He patted his bow tie, raised a hand to his mouth and politely cleared his throat, as if about to do no more than enter a room. He smoothed back his hair. Now that the house lights were down he could hear the gradually thickening murmur, like something coming to a boil.
It did not happen very often, but now it happened. The sudden giving way of his stomach, the panic, vertigo, revulsion. He did not have to do this thing: turn into someone else. It posed the paralysing question of who he was in the first place, and the answer was simple. He was nobody. Nobody.
And where was he? He was nowhere. He was on a flimsy structure built over swirling water. Normally he didn’t think about it. Now his own legs might have turned to useless struts of rusting iron, clamped in sand. Above all there was the concern that no one should see this, know that he suffered in this way.
No one ever would. In fifty years no one ever would.
He checked his flies for the fourth or fifth time, so that now it was a mere fingering of the air.
He needed someone to push him, to give the brutal shove in his back. Only one person could ever do it: his mother. No one would ever know this either. Every night, every time, still her unseen shove. He barely noticed it and barely thought to thank her.
Where was she tonight? As far as he knew, she was with a man called Carter, her second husband she called him, a garage owner in Croydon. And good luck to her. But it hadn’t stopped her giving him, all these years, her invisible push in the back. Sometimes even, he imagined, invisible again among the seats in the dark, her watching, approving eye.
That’s my Jack, that’s my brilliant boy.
A garage owner—called Carter. I ask you, folks, I ask you. There was a theatre in Croydon called The Grand. He had played there, pantomime. Buttons. Had she come, secretly, with Mr Carter—smelling of car engines and thinking: Bloody Cinderella? That’s my boy Jack.
Now he was a boy of twenty-eight and already an old stager, wearing like a second skin this black-and-white get-up that was the outdated rig of showmen, conmen, masqueraders everywhere. These days they were wearing jeans and leather jackets, and twanging guitars. Well, that had come too late for him. For him it was the cane and the boater and the tap shoes. ‘And now, folks—don’t scream too loudly, girls—it’s the sensational Rockabye Boys!’ As if he were their fucking uncle. But he had the looks (he knew it), the grin and the lock of hair—he swept it back again—that could flop forward and knock ’em dead (on and off stage, incidentally).
If he could just get on stage in the first place.
As for her ‘first husband’, there was a man who was truly nobody, truly nowhere: his father. But in between— and it had been a long in-between—she had gone on stage herself, what a cruel bastard business. Think about it and you were lost. And who did she have to push her?
No one must see this, no one must know. He could hear the rising murmur waiting to engulf him. He must breathe, breathe. ‘Don’t cry, Cinders.’ Now he had only himself to push himself, but how was he to do it? Cross the line, step over the edge.
Jack was compere that season (his second) and Ronnie and Evie had the first spot after the interval. It was thanks to Jack that they were in the show at all, and the first spot after the interval was a good one to have. When everything changed, fell apart that August they moved up to last spot of all, not counting Jack’s own end-of-show routine.
They’d moved by then up the billing too. People were coming specially to see them. The billboards even started to carry pasted-on fliers with such stuff as ‘Come and See with Your Own Eyes!’ Jack had said, ‘Who else’s eyes would it be then?’ But his quips weren’t so many by those days. His public quips continued. Have you heard the one about the garage owner’s wife? The show must go on.
‘You’re in Brighton, folks, so bloody well brighten up!’
It went on through to early September, and the public only saw the marvel of the thing, the talked-about thing. Then the show was over and the talked-about thing was no more than that, it could only ever exist in the memories of those who’d seen it, with their own eyes, in those few summer weeks. Then those memories would themselves fade. They might wonder anyway if they really had seen it.
Other things were over too. Ronnie and Evie, having had a remarkable debut, coming from nowhere to achieve summer fame and having secured for themselves, it would seem, future bookings, even a whole career, never appeared on stage again. Ronnie never appeared again at all.
According to Eddie Costello, one of the local ‘Arts and Entertainments’ hacks, writing only a month or so before, the couple—and they were a real couple—had ‘taken Brighton by storm’. Possibly overstated at the time, it was now only half the story and no longer a mere Arts and Entertainments one.
Evie finally took off her engagement ring. It had been another case of the show must go on. In the days when his quips were free in coming Jack had cracked that they were engaged to do the summer season, they didn’t have to get engaged to each other too. Though clearly they had. The engagement ring, with its single sparkling gem, was even a visible complement—tiny but visible—to her silvery costume. How would it have looked if she’d taken it off before the show came to an end? And it was, like any such ring, a guarantee. If it all worked out, and surely it would, they would get married that September when the show closed and take a honeymoon—preferably not in Brighton.
Or perhaps Evie had hoped that by carrying on wearing the ring the whole thing might revert to what it had been. Everything might be redeemed. She hadn’t given it back to Ronnie. Ronnie hadn’t asked for it back. He hadn’t said anything. Let the ring itself decide.
One day that September, after the show had finished and after the police had said she was free to leave Brighton, she did the obvious thing. She went to the end of the pier, took off the ring and threw it in the sea. She never told Jack. Even then she’d thought, without knowing how her life would turn out, that doing this with the ring might somehow have brought everything back. Might even have brought Ronnie back.
It was a regular seaside holiday show. Variety. Anything from acrobats to the up-and-coming Rockabye Boys to the no longer up-and-coming yet ample Doris Lane, sometimes known as the ‘Mistress of Melody’, sometimes (in cheeky reference to one of her rivals) as the ‘Forces Fiancée’. Anything from jugglers and plate-spinners to ‘Lord Archibald’, who came on holding a large teddy bear—‘hand up its arse’ as Jack put it—which he would talk to, and the teddy bear would talk back with a considerable gift for repartee. Throughout that season they would hold conversations on the unfolding state of the world—what Macmillan should have said to Eisenhower and so on. On occasion they might even ‘become’ Macmillan and Eisenhower, or Khrushchev and de Gaulle. It was the funniest thing, a teddy bear talking like General de Gaulle.
But it was all held together by Jack as compere. The impression was that it was his show. They came to be taken under his wing and it wouldn’t have been the same without him. Your pal for the night, your host with the most. Off stage he’d say he was just the oil in the wheels—the oilier the better. But it was no small task.
He was Jack Robinson in those days, as in ‘before you can say’. Some patter, some gags, some of them smutty, a bit of singing, some dancing, some tapping of his heels. He did the introductions and links, but also a few numbers of his own and always appeared at the end to wind up the show and do his farewell routine.
The important thing was to send them all out with their holiday mood endorsed, feeling they’d had their money’s worth, they’d had a good time, making them even feel they might sing and dance a bit themselves. For many of them, an evening at the pier show was the highlight.
‘And so, folks, this is your old mate Jack Robinson saying goodnight and sweet dreams, whoever she is. And here’s a little song to see you on your way. I think you know which one it is. Maestro—if you please!
When the red, red robin . . .’
If the audience felt so moved, they might sing along. Or when they went out, to the lights and the sound and smell of the sea again, they might indeed find themselves, as they strolled with happy feet along the boards, singing in their heads, or even out loud, snatches of that song.
I’m just a kid again doing what I did again!
It was August 1959.
When Ronnie and Evie moved to final spot, pipping even the Rockabye Boys, Jack’s goodnight routine became, in more ways than one, a little trickier. Why had Ronnie and Evie moved to final spot? Because, while the show must go on, there was another theatrical law that said: save till last anything that might be hard to follow. But not to have had Jack’s closing number would have been unthinkable, even changed the nature of the show. So on he would come, after all the applause for Ronnie and Evie had died away, having to adapt his farewell patter. He would have his hands raised and pressed together, as if having shared the applause, or in prayerful salute. He would get out his white handkerchief to mop his brow. He would put a sly twist on his having been upstaged.
‘Well didn’t I tell you, boys and girls, didn’t I say? Now all you’ve got is me. Back down to earth, eh?’
He would drape the handkerchief over his hand and shake it, as if giving it commands. He would turn to the audience and shrug.
The note of clownish companionship was struck. They were in his palm again. It was a skill. Even in those days you could see the man was not just good looks and greasepaint.
Eddie Costello, who was to go on to write for the News of the World, would always claim he’d seen it, even if at the time it was Ronnie and Evie he’d picked out.
In the dressing room Ronnie and Evie, turning back into their normal selves, might hear the band striking up and the audience singing along with Jack. They would not sing along themselves. They might not even speak to each other. Or they might try to. The audience who had seen them, only moments ago, bringing about a wonder, would not guess at this off-stage inadequacy.
Years, even decades later, when Jack had long since ceased to be Jack Robinson—who could even remember that fleeting figure?—when he was just Jack Robbins again, though some spoke of his one day being Sir Jack Robbins, he was apt to say in interviews, with lordly modesty, ‘Actor? Oh, just an old song-and-dance man me.’ And he could still sing to himself, playing the part, his one-time song. Wake up, wake up, you sleepy head! And he could still give, if he wished, his end-of-the-pier wink and flashing grin, both fully visible and almost catchable from the back row.
Product details
- Publisher : Knopf; First Edition (September 22, 2020)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 208 pages
- ISBN-10 : 052565805X
- ISBN-13 : 978-0525658054
- Item Weight : 12 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.49 x 0.88 x 7.78 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #895,302 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,845 in 20th Century Historical Romance (Books)
- #6,434 in Psychological Fiction (Books)
- #40,104 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Graham Swift was born in 1949 and is the author of ten novels, two collections of short stories, including the highly acclaimed England and Other Stories, and of Making an Elephant, a book of essays, portraits, poetry and reflections on his life in writing. His most recent novel, Mothering Sunday, became an international bestseller and won The Hawthornden Prize for best work of imaginative literature. With Waterland he won the Guardian Fiction Prize, and with Last Orders the Booker Prize. Both novels were made into films. His work has appeared in over thirty languages.
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonReviews with images
-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
But it’s Ronnie Deane’s past that, for me, is the heart of the book, beginning with his evacuation from the flat he shares in London’s East End with his housekeeper mother and absentee sailor father during the London Blitz in the early days of World War II. In one of the most moving and beautiful scenes I have ever read, Swift describes the sea of tearful mothers, most waving white handkerchiefs bought specially for the occasion, as the train loaded with their children pulls out of the station. Ronnie gets lucky: He is sent to Oxfordshire to live at Evergrene with the Lawrences, a genteel childless couple who open up what seems like a magical world to him and then introduce him to actual magic, the “illusions” which his foster father teaches him. Ronnie’s memories of these years, a sort of halcyon period, shape the rest of his life and lead directly to his relationship with Evie, which in turn leads to one final illusion—Ronnie’s most audacious yet.
I loved this book—the elegiac tone, the gorgeously depicted scenes from a vaudeville past in England that was even then fading away, the dreamy feeling that—much like with Ronnie’s illusions—Swift is lifting the veil only on what he wants us to see, leaving so much more shrouded in mystery. And the writing is superb. In fact, my only complaint is that I listened to “Here We Are” as an audiobook—an extremely well-read and enjoyable one (especially in the show sections, which included snatches of Jack Robbins’ musical interludes) but nevertheless a format that didn’t allow me to highlight and linger over and really appreciate Swift’s gorgeous prose. Definitely worth buying the book as well.
The narrator spoke in a monotone for most of the story, almost as if he was sitting next to me and whispering the story in my ear. That is, when he wasn’t singing popular songs from the variety act in 1959 which the book is about.
I am not at all familiar with the setting, Brighton pier in the UK. I definitely would have enjoyed this more if the author had described the area more and set the atmosphere before the story unfolded.
Most of the story takes place during the summer of 1959. Meet Jack Robinson, the compere of this vaudeville theater, he is the person who begins and ends the show and often performs songs himself. The duo of Ronnie the Magician and Evie, his assistant are the hit of the season. There is chemistry between these two, but also between Evie and Jack. These relationships were a bit hard to get a handle on. The story goes back and forth in time and jumps from one person to another. I found this omniscient point of view not really working for me in this book, it felt disruptive.
It wasn’t until about half way through the book that I realized that this was Evie, 50 years later, remembering that fateful summer. There is a great presentation towards the end of the novel but it wasn’t enough to make this short novel memorable.
None of the characters were completely filled out or described. I thought I could understand Ronnie the most as we do get a little bit of back story on him. He was sent away from London during the Blitz and was raised by a foster family. We do learn that Ronnie had parents who wanted him to do well in the theater but I don’t remember much at all about Evie’s life before she became the magician’s assistant. Unfortunately I couldn’t connect with any of these characters.
If someone would ask me what the book was about I would have to say “the thoughts of a magician’s assistant, thinking back on a summer that changed her life”. I know that there is more that the author was trying to intuit but I didn’t feel engaged with the story enough to get more meaning from the novel.
I received the audiobook from the publisher through NetGalley.
I was occasionally reminded of fairy tales or the wonderfully eccentric fiction of the under-appreciated James Purdy, but Swift is utterly original and finally compares to no one.
The book opens with Jack Robinson, a variety show master of ceremonies and song-and-dance man with “the nutcracker grin.” He’s soon joined by the other two main characters, Ronnie the magician and his assistant Evie, who take the stage name of Pablo and Eve. Here’s Eve, making tea between rehearsals:
“And it must have looked very odd, too, a woman sometimes in little more than sequins and plumes in that cubby hole, with its stained and smelly sink, filling the kettle, warming the pot. Her plumes could get in the way and upset things if she wasn’t careful, but she’d learned long ago to be aware of her attachments as an animal must be aware of its tail. Every chorus girl has this sixth sense.”
If you demand strict verisimilitude, you’re probably going to have trouble with this book. But if you can forfeit that for sheer richness of storytelling, you’re in for a good ride.
In the photo on the rear flap of the dust jacket, Swift looks as if he has something up his sleeve.
This was my fourth Graham Swift, and I know I need to work my way through the rest of his oeuvre. His 1996 LAST ORDERS, which won the Booker Prize, is one of the most memorable novels of the past half century.
Top reviews from other countries
The story revolves around a love triangle of three young entertainers - Jack, Evie and Ronnie - who are performing in the Brighton Pier Summer Season at the end of the 1950s. The themes are perception and reality, trickery and illusion as well as identity - all the world's a stage.
The 1950s British seaside entertainment world is captured in all its tarnished glory - you can taste the candy floss, smell the sea breeze and hear the squawking of the seagulls overhead as you read this novel.
There are three central characters here, each of them, when we first meet them, entertainers on the Brighton Pier in 1959: Jack Robbins, at 28, a compere; Ronnie Deane, a magician; and Evie White, Ronnie’s assistant. While Jack is fading in his role, Ronnie and Evie have become the star attraction. From the beginning there are references to the role their mothers have played in their lives, and before long we get Ronnie’s back story, the only part that appealed to me.
He had lived in poverty in Bethnal Greene with his mother, who was a washerwoman; his father was a seaman who was hardly ever at home. In 1939, then aged eight, was evacuated from London (touchingly described) and was taken in by a wealthy childless couple, Eric and Penelope Lawrence, living in the Oxfordshire countryside, and there is a wonderful description of how strange his opulent surroundings were to the little boy, of how mysterious their social life was to him, and of how lovingly the couple treated him. Mr Lawrence, who had once been a magician, was a dab hand at making rabbits appear and disappear by magic, and taught Ronnie some of his tricks. When the war ended and the 14 year old boy had to return to his now widowed mother in London. He was now old enough to earn his living, and his mother was appalled when he told her he wanted to be a magician. He took jobs as a stage hand in theatres. Then he had to do his national service. There he had met Jack Robbins, who had been in entertainment, and who, when their national service was over, offered Ronnie a job if he could find an assistant. There will be many descriptions of the tricks Ronnie was able to perform with Evie, without, of course, any explanations how they were done.
When we switch to Evie, it is not the backstory of her childhood and youth we get, but her memories in 2009, when she was seventy-five, a year after her husband had died. It turns out that the husband was not Ronnie, to whom she been engaged in 1959, but Jack, whose career had then apparently been on a downward path; and we are given an idea of how that happened. In the 49 years of their marriage, under her shrewd guidance (but no details given), they had created their own highly successful company, Rainbow Productions, of which Jack was actor-producer-director, and he had even been awarded a CBE. She had never quite forgotten Ronnie, and at the very end there is a mystery about what had happened to him.
I hesitated between two stars and three.
As I read on a Kindle I quite often highlight and save sentences or paragraphs that move me or that I find are a joy to read. A great deal of highlighting went on whilst reading this outstanding book.