Killed like animals

Wish You Were Here is Graham Swift’s ninth novel, and he adopts a trending topic among the literati, namely the ‘war on terror’. But he does so at a slant. Rather than the dinner-party debate staged by his contemporaries, Swift domesticates the war on terror within a very personal story of loss.

The novel centres around the death of Tom Luxton, a soldier in Iraq, and the effect it has on his elder brother, Jack. But Tom’s death is merely the trigger for a Proustian excess of memory, as Jack begins revisiting ‘all the things that had once been dead and buried’ including his mother’s death, his father’s suicide and Tom’s teenage escape flight from the suffocating restrictions of ‘agricultural ruin’ to the army.

It is an odd novel in many ways. While jammed with emotional incident, there is next to no plot. Instead, the tangles of memory continually boomerang back to Jack sitting on his bed, frozen with inaction.