Here We Are by Graham Swift

​   This book had me at magic. And magicians. I always expect pure literary magic out of books about magicians and oftentimes that’s the case, but in this instance not so much. It is literary and has magic in it, and a magician, and a magician’s assistant and their compère and the three find themselves in a love triangle that seemingly only magic can resolve, but the overall effect is somehow muted. At least, it’s nowhere near as excited as The Amazing Pablo’s performances.
   It’s almost frustrating, because it definitely has all the right ingredients in play, interweaving historical fiction and romance and mystery over the decades as these three lives remain forever tangled in a way, but the triangle here is far from equilateral, Jack the compère gets the shortest side, Eve and Ronnie share the rest fairly evenly, only Eve gets to travel forward in time and Ronnie backward. Ronnie is by far my favorite and the most interesting character, from his impoverish childhood to a chance meeting that sets him on course to perform magic to building a career for himself, finding a perfect assistant, proposing…and having to contend with the unfair distinctly unmagical tricks of real life. Eve is less explained or maybe to me less explicable and Jack isn’t all that developed altogether. So isosceles as far as triangles go.
    This is my first time reading the author I believe, though he’s so well known and acclaimed, and it’s easy to understand the attention, the man produces a uniformly high quality narrative. There was something about it, though, something too gossamer like, too dreamy, too heavily leaning of a tell instead of show that didn’t quite work for me. It was an easy enough of a read and quick too (however funny it might have been to end up with a slow and ponderous book from an author named Swift) and I did it in one sitting late into the night, but not quite as magical as I’d hoped. Worthy read and a reasonably good introduction to the author, but left something to be desired. It would make a lovely BBC adaptation, though. Someone should get on that, really.