Starred review from May 21, 2012
Swift's stunning new novel (after Light of Day) begins with deceptive slowness, detailing the lives of Jack and Ellie, the English husband-and-wife proprietors of a trailer park on the Isle of Wight. Jack and his brother Tom grew up on a dairy farm, but after mad cow disease decimates the livestock, their father commits suicide and the brothers grow apartâTom enlists and goes off to fight in Iraq, while Jack and Ellie built a happy, if quiet, existence. But when a letter from the Ministry of Defence arrivesâaddressed to the old farm and rerouted "by someone with a long memory" to the Isle of WightâJack learns that the burden of repatriating his brother's remains has fallen on his shoulders, a responsibility that will cause Jack to confront the complexities of "life and all its knowledge," and the sheltering peace of death. Swift (Last Orders) creates an elegant rawness with language that carries the reader through several layers of Jack's consciousness at onceâhis lonely past, his uncertain future, and the ways in which his father and his brother both refuse to leave him alone, despite how long they've been gone.
February 15, 2012
A novel as contemporary as international terrorism and the war in Iraq and as timeless as mortality, from one of Britain's literary masters. "The past is past, and the dead are the dead," was the belief of the strong-willed Ellie, whose husband, Jack, a stolid former farmer, is the protagonist of Swift's ninth and most powerful novel. As anyone will recognize who is familiar with his prize-winning masterworks (Last Orders, 1996, etc.), such a perspective on the past is in serious need of correction, which this novel provides in a subtly virtuosic and surprisingly suspenseful manner. It's a sign of Swift's literary alchemy that he gleans so much emotional and thematic richness from such deceptively common stock. Jack and Ellie have grown up together in the British farm country, and their marriage is practically inevitable once both are on their own. Jack's mother died when he was a boy; Ellie's left home for another man. Jack's brother, Tom, eight years younger but in many ways more worldly and self-assertive, forsakes the farm life to join the army as soon as he can. The fathers of Jack and Ellie both die; Tom remains out of contact for more than a decade. At Ellie's insistence, they sell their property in order to run a seaside vacation park she has inherited. Every winter the childless couple takes a Caribbean vacation. When Tom dies in Iraq, Jack must deal with the arrangements. He cancels the annual vacation and his marriage all but unravels. The minister who had handled the funeral of Jack's father and now his brother knows that the eulogy needs to be "as little and simple as possible...as simple as possible being really the essence of the thing." Swift somehow cuts to the essence of both a family's legacy and the modern malaise through the reticent Jack, who comes to terms with the realization that "all the things that had once been dead and buried had come back again."Profound empathy and understated eloquence mark a novel so artfully nuanced that the last few pages send the reader back to the first few, with fresh understanding.
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Starred review from April 1, 2012
This perfectly titled novel is about longing for the people in our lives who have died. Taking place over just a few days, it focuses on Jack Luxton's journey to retrieve the remains of his brother Tom, a soldier who died in Iraq. The brothers grew up on a farm in the British countryside, and hovering over the story is the specter of mad cow disease on one end and terror (both political and personal) on the other. Madness and terror certainly infect Jack, who has suffered the loss of nearly everyone he loves. The question that propels the action is whether he will ultimately destroy himself as well. Like Swift's Waterland, this book explores the ways the past haunts us, and, like his Booker Prize-winning Last Orders, it uses a death as a provocation for the examination of self and country. VERDICT Swift has written a slow-moving but powerful novel about the struggle to advance beyond grief and despair and to come to grips with the inevitability of change. Recommended for fans of Ian McEwan, Michael Ondaatje, and Kazuo Ishiguro, authors with a similar method of slowly developing an intense interior narrative. [See Prepub Alert, 9/30/11.]--Evelyn Beck, Piedmont Technical Coll., Greenwood, SC
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Starred review from February 15, 2012
Jack meant it when he wrote, Wish you were here, on a postcard to Ellie, the girl who lived on the adjacent Devon family farm, a seemingly banal sentiment that gains gravitas as this subtly powerful novel unfolds. A stoic adolescent close to his mother and protective of his younger, quicksilver brother, Tom, Jack became a large man of few words. He toughed it out with his irascible father after his mother died, the mad-cow catastrophe plunged their dairy farm into hopeless debt, and Tom ran off to join the army. Years later, Jack and Ellie are living on the Isle of Wight when Jack learns that Tom has been killed in Iraq by a roadside bomb, a loss that hits their house-of-cards marriage with percussive force. Booker Prize winner Swift is masterful in his penetrating evocation of the land Jack loves, the many languages a body can speak, and the cavernous unknown concealed beneath apparent intimacy. Brilliantly illuminating the wounded psyches of his characters, circling back to corral the secrets of the past while finding the timeless core within present conflicts, and consummately infusing this gorgeously empathic tale with breath-holding suspense, Swift tests ancient convictions about birthright, nature, love, heroism, war, death, and the covenant of grief. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Supported by vigorous promotion, Swift's first novel in five years may well rekindle the interest created by his Booker-winning Tomorrow and Booker-shortlisted Waterland.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)