Ruminative. So ruminative. Jack and Ellie grew up on neighboring dairy farms in very out-of-the-way North Devon. They both lost their mothers, the dairy cow business went to hell what with the BSE and then hoof and mouth disease, and the only recompense they had in their teenage and young adult years was each other. Lest this sound at all romantic in some sense, it's not very; Jack is the slow silent type without much to say, but it all works well enough. At least for Jack.

Ellie, though satisfied with Jack, is much less satisfied with dairy cow farming in Devon. Which seems a perfectly logical place to have arrived. A fortuitous inheritance finds her in possession of a vacation spot on the Isle of Wight and she convinces Jack to swap out livelihoods, complete with summer trips to the Caribbean. But as it turns out, you can take the slow silent dairy farmer out of the dairy farm, but you can't take the dairy farm out of the slow silent dairy farmer.

When Jack's little brother Tom, who ran off from the farm to join the army on his 18th birthday, is reported dead in Iraq by that army, all the tensions and contradictions of "Jack and Ellie on the Isle of Wight with summers in the Caribbean" are brought to crisis. Ellie can't bring herself to go back to the past. Jack gets swallowed up by it in his grief. The reader is stewed in it, marinated, turned over, and pulled out at last to face the possible violence of its conclusion.

It's a very well constructed and well written novel, illustrating violence - both literal and figurative - done by the modern world to men who once would have taken their place in a solid and traditional society that is suddenly no more. I liked it, but didn't love it. ( )

I got so bogged down in the ruminative structure of this novel and at the same time found I cared little about any of its characters. I didn’t really believe the farm setting and thought the repeated trope of cow diseases was factitous. The last quarter I read only first sentences of paragraphs and felt I didn’t lose a lot. Is this just a bulked up short story. Is that what Swift does - works up what are basically short stories? A short story cannot stretch to nearly 400 pages. ( )

I have just finished reading Wish You Were Here by Graham Swift (Scribner). One of our greatest writers at the peak of his powers, weaving the tension from a patchwork of relationships and recollections. ( )

Een man maakt een rondrit, van het eiland Wight over Oxfordshire naar Noord-Devon en weer terug. Of beter: een man zit op een bed met een geladen geweer achter zich en wacht. Ondertussen ontvouwt zich een heel leven. Of beter: levens. Het zijne, dat van het meisje op de naburige boerderij, dat van zijn nukkige vader en zijn gevoelige broer, dat van koeien die misschien wel en misschien niet gek zijn, dat van de hond Luke.

Graham Swift verwerkt de personages, de gebeurtenissen en de plaatsen - Jebb Farm, de eik, een stel caravans - in een grote spiraal, waarin alles weerkeert, telkens wat dieper. Eerst langzaam, dan sneller en sneller, tot je als lezer meegesleurd wordt en niet meer kan stoppen, ook al gebeurt er niet meer dan dat een man een rondrit maakt, of nee, dat een man wacht met een geladen geweer. ( )

“His mother is dead, yet she has never not been, in theory, at his shoulder. He wants her not to have known and suffered or even witnessed all the things that followed her death. Including all this now. But that would be like wishing her dead. Merely dead.”

This novel centres on a middle-aged couple Jack and Ellie Luxton. Both are in their late thirties and grew up the children of neighbouring north Devon farmers and are the last of their respective families. They are childhood sweethearts who now own and manage a caravan park on the Isle of White.

Jack used to live on Jebb Farm with his parents, Michael and Vera, and his younger brother Tom, who eventually runs off to join the Army. As the book opens he is sat at an upstairs window on a stormy day with a shotgun at his side ruminating on his past. Instead of milking cows, he is “the soft-living proprietor” looking after holiday-makers. Instead of struggling to make ends meet they are now living a comfortable life even enjoying Caribbean holidays in the off season but he is still haunted by the memories of cow carcasses being burnt during the mad-cow disease (BSE) outbreak. A memory that is brought vividly back to him when he watches images of cows again being burnt during a foot and mouth outbreak.

A week before the day on which the book is set Jack has been informed that his brother Tom has been killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq and that his body will shortly be repatriated forcing him to confront long buried memories.

Most of the book is told through the thoughts of Jack although Ellie is by no means forgotten whilst the thoughts of a few other minor characters including his brother, Tom, figure briefly. Jack is a thoughtful man who has to a certain extent lived a sheltered life whereas Ellie is much more worldly wise.

Most of Jack’s memories tend to centre on the decline of Jebb Farm, in particular after the death of his mother by natural causes, “the ruin that had been creeping up on them… since Vera Luxton had died” but also centres on the stories about Fred and George Luxton, two brothers who died on the same day at the Somme.

This is the story of one couple but it is also chronicles the tale of declining English small scale farming communities struggling to keep their farms afloat and uncertain as to what to do when their efforts fail.

This is a really well written novel that tells an affecting tale. The realities of rural life are wonderfully depicted. It centres on the struggles not purely against nature but also within families. The emphasis is on tradition and community but also features abandonment by both dead and deserting mothers, as well as domineering, remote fathers. However, this is not all doom and gloom, there are also smatterings of humour to help lighten the mood.

The book is deliberately not told in chronological order, however, if I have one complaint with it, it is that we are informed far too early in the novel that Jack is sat looking out the window awaiting the return of Ellie with a shotgun at his side struggling against madness. We have no idea as to what has caused this. By the time that Ellie does return home some of the effect is lost. I had almost stopped caring why Jack has got a loaded gun next to him never really believing that he would use it whatever the provocation. Swift is obviously a master of his trade and is quickly becoming one of my favourite authors but overall I felt that this one just missed the mark. ( )