Neither here nor there?

FICTION: GILES NEWINGTON reviews Wish You Were HereBy Graham Swift, Picador, 353pp. £18.99

A LANDSCAPE DOMINATED by a 500-year-old oak tree. An old farm rendered untenable by the threat of mad-cow disease and the violence of the human response to it. A medal from the first World War, handed down through the generations. An epigraph from William Blake, asking: “Are these things done on Albion’s shore?”

It would be difficult to believe that the heavy freight of symbolism in Graham Swift’s painstakingly crafted new novel is unintentional. Everything, it would seem, stands in for something else: the hardy oak is England; BSE equates to 9/11, and the resulting mounds of burning cattle carcasses to the war on terror; the medal, with its background story of two slaughtered brothers, represents both heroism and pointless brutality. All in all, this apparently plain-speaking narrative of a farming family is a state-of-England metaphor.

The novel is seen mainly from the viewpoint of the reticent Jack, last of the Luxtons, who has swapped his Devonshire birthright for an Isle of Wight caravan park that he runs with his wife and one-time farming neighbour, Ellie. As it starts he is waiting at home in Lookout Cottage, a loaded shotgun at the ready, for Ellie to return. Something has happened between them, and clearly Jack’s intentions are murderous, suicidal or both. This threat hangs over the novel for its entire course, ensuring its tension, as the events of the previous decades are recalled.

“There is no end to madness, Jack thinks, once it takes hold.” This, the novel’s opening sentence, straightaway establishes its central character’s taste for rumination and self-examination. For, in contrast to his rough-and-ready outward demeanour, Jack’s thought processes are intricate and detailed. From the start, several time frames are expertly juggled as Jack moves back and forth through the phases of his life, from a childhood on Jebb Farm with his parents, dog and younger brother, Tom, to the death (usually violent) of each of these in turn and his consequent decision to sell up and move on.

Sparking the novel’s crisis is the news, early on, that Tom has been killed in Iraq, fighting in the British army he left home to join on his 18th birthday. Jack has not communicated with Tom in years, and their relationship, once close, has become complicated by guilt, on one side about staying (and thereby inheriting) and on the other about leaving (and thereby escaping). The depth of Jack’s grief clashes with Ellie’s desire to put the past behind them. After years of agricultural toil and familial responsibility, she has finally steered their lives to a more relaxed place, and she wants to remain there. She would also like to have a child; Jack remains resistant to embracing the future in this way.

The novel’s strongest section deals with the repatriation of Tom’s body, as the gradually unravelling Jack, temporarily abandoned by Ellie, negotiates motorways, service stations, cheap hotels and, most affectingly, a grim ceremony at a military base. Sunk in his tortuous internal musings, he is soon seeing ghosts.

Tom’s funeral takes Jack back to his old home, where the sight of the renovated Jebb Farm increases his torment. (For a while, too, the viewpoint shifts, to Jebb’s new owner, Clare, the filthy-rich blow-in from London who is spending her unfaithful’s husband’s millions on a country retreat and discovering that possessing her “very own little piece of England” is more complicated than she’d bargained for.)

Many of the themes in Wish You Were Hereare familiar from Swift's previous work. His best-known books, Waterland(1983) and the Booker prize-winning Last Orders(1996), both subsequently made into films, deal memorably with history, landscape, war, family secrets and their effect on superficially unremarkable characters. This time, though, Swift is no longer in the territory he has made his own – the Fens, the London suburbs – and the depiction of the rural setting has less conviction.

Perhaps Swift’s apparent striving for a wider resonance works against the particularity of Jebb Farm. If he is making a statement about a changing England or the war that kills Tom, it is hard to know what it is. The fate of the medal that the family has passed on for decades would suggest he is saying something about the need to relinquish notions of heroism, even at the price of a more trivial existence. But neither the scenes of military procedure nor the episodes described from the soldier Tom’s point of view seem to have much to say about the conflict that underlies Swift’s story.

Similarly, our sympathy for Jack as a simple man in the grip of historical events is undermined by his convoluted, though imaginative, cogitations, even under intense emotional pressure: "Do caravans knowthings, have feelings, premonitions? . . . Did cattleknow things? Did they know when trouble, death even (as it quite often could be) was on its way? Did they know the difference between madness and normality? A cow was only one notch up, perhaps, in thinking power, from a caravan. At Jebb, Jack had occasionally thought he wasn't that many notches up from a cow."

Wish You Were Hereis an atmospheric depiction of a world shaken by the tremors from distant events, and the violent happenings that take place under Jebb's ancient oak bring to mind the bleak fate of the real-life weapons inspector Dr David Kelly. Sometimes, though, it would be good to get the plain tale without the slew of metaphorical baggage, to be able to see the farm for the oak tree.

GILES NEWINGTONis an Irish Timesjournalist