Implicitly precarious

Graham Swift’s Here We Are - published in the UK five years ago today - is steeped in Brighton, with Brighton’s Palace Pier both setting and symbol in the summer of 1959, the heyday of seaside variety entertainment. Swift evokes the scene with precision: the stage ‘on a flimsy structure built over swirling water’, the pier boards beneath performers’ feet, the tang of salt air drifting into the theatre, and the nightly dispersal of audiences back onto the beach and prom. For him, the seaside is an ‘implicitly precarious’ place. 

The story circles around three performers: Jack Robinson, a gifted compère; Ronnie Deane, who takes the stage name ‘The Great Pablo’; and his assistant Evie White. The pier theatre is their world, a place of illusions, transformations, and betrayals, all played out above the restless sea. Ronnie, once a wartime evacuee lodged with a Brighton family, has made his identity anew as a magician. Evie, by day a shop worker in town, by night slips into sequins and vanishes nightly into Pablo’s illusions. Jack holds it all together with wit and warmth. But as the season that summer reaches its climax, Ronnie vanishes not just from the stage but from their lives. Swift then shifts the perspective to decades later, when Evie looks back on the Brighton summer that shaped everything. The pier, the gaudy lights, the endless stretch of pebbles, become bound up with memory, loss and the final trick that could never be undone.

Brighton is not only a backdrop here but a character in itself. Its beach is a place of impermanence, its pier a fragile platform where each night’s show disappears as soon as it is conjured. The book’s themes of illusion, disappearance and reinvention mirror the seaside town’s own rhythms, with its tides of visitors, its lights that glitter and fade, and its stages that once seemed to promise the world.

Swift, born in London in 1949, has always been a novelist of memory and what might be thought of as the ungraspable past. He read English at Cambridge and came to prominence with Waterland in 1983, a novel that blended history and personal inheritance, later adapted into film. His Last Orders won the Booker Prize in 1996, and across a dozen novels he has returned again and again to the mysteries of time, identity and loss.

Here is Swift in The Guardian writing about his book in 2021: ‘It seems I’m attracted to the seaside. It features in several of my books. A large part of my latest novel, Here We Are, is set not just in Brighton, but in a theatre on Brighton Pier. But then we are all, surely, drawn to the seaside. It’s a deeply compelling - and paradoxical - place. We go there for enjoyment, yet at the same time it is an elemental zone where land and water meet and thus, with or without the presence of cliffs, it is implicitly precarious. Nothing could more embody this than the seaside pier – a flimsy-looking structure dedicated to fun and frivolity, deliberately constructed over the crashing waves.

Interestingly, the book’s cover - taken from a famous American natural history book, The Birds of America by John James Audubon - was given a bespoke billboard installation by the Buildhollywood agency. It features hundreds of individual feathers hand applied and said to create ‘a bold, textured display to match the dramatics of the novel’.