He’d see again, as he smoothed the duvet, that white, closed gate. Then the thought would seize him that he could real y have done it—dropped the medal in the grave, it might have been the thing to do, the right place for that medal. Al his useless, too-late thoughts, arriving after the event, but this one stil had a use, and some thoughts were best never enacted. His hand would shake as he retrieved the box of cartridges. He’d hear the splashing of El ie in the bath.
But al this—while he had stil to open the door that his brother had guarded—was yet to come. His scramble to return the gun to the cabinet meant there was a significant delay. It was just as wel El ie had delayed too, wil ing the door not to stay shut, and his foolish idea about the umbrel a stand had prompted a more practical course of action.
Jack walks towards El ie, holding a seaside umbrel a.
El ie walks towards Jack. Then the umbrel a covers them both, the wind trying to wrest it from Jack’s battling grip, the rain beating a tattoo against it.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
GRAHAM SWIFT was born in 1949 in London, where he stil lives and works. He is the author of eight previous novels: The Sweet-Shop Owner; Shuttlecock, which received the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize; Waterland, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize and won the Guardian Fiction Award, the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, and the Italian Premio Grinzane Cavour; Out of This World; Ever After, which won the French Prix du Meil eur Livre Étranger; Last Orders, which was awarded the Booker Prize; The Light of Day; and, most recently, Tomorrow.
He is also the author of Learning to Swim, a col ection of short stories, and Making an Elephant, a book of essays, portraits, poetry, and reflections on his life in writing. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages.
Wish You Were Here
By Graham Swift
Reading Group Guide
ABOUT THIS READING
GROUP GUIDE
The questions, discussion topics, and reading list that fol ow are intended to enhance your reading group’s discussion of Wish You Were Here, Booker Prize–winning author Graham Swift’s latest novel.
ABOUT THE BOOK
“Swift weaves a story which is as much a lament for a vanished way of life as an attack on the madness of modernity. With unmistakable echoes of Thomas Hardy and E. M. Forster, he portrays a rural England that is no longer merely under threat, but has been comprehensively vanquished … Swift exercises a compel ing mastery of tone and trajectory, and Jack’s criss-crossing of southern England (reminiscent of Hardy’s Tess traversing the Dorset countryside), fol owing the route of his brother’s repatriated remains, unsure whether he is ahead of or behind them, makes for an emotional y gripping narrative … Swift portrays the struggle of the dispossessed individual with al the complex and overwhelming force of what, in Yeats’s words, ‘is past, or passing, or to come.’” — Times Literary Supplement [UK]
From the prizewinning author of the acclaimed Last Orders, The Light of Day, and Waterland, a powerful y moving new novel set in present-day England, but against the background of a global “war on terror” and about things that touch our human core.
On an autumn day in 2006, on the Isle of Wight, Jack Luxton
—once a farmer, now the proprietor of a seaside caravan park—receives the news that his brother, Tom, not seen for years, has been kil ed in combat in Iraq. The news wil have far-reaching effects for Jack and his wife, El ie, and wil far-reaching effects for Jack and his wife, El ie, and wil compel Jack to make a crucial journey: to receive his brother’s remains, but also to return to the land of his past and of his most secret, troubling memories. A gripping, hauntingly intimate, and compassionate story that moves toward a fiercely suspenseful climax, Wish You Were Here translates the stuff of headlines into heartwrenching personal truth.
QUESTIONS FOR
DISCUSSION
1. “Wish you were here” is a powerful phrase in the novel. Why is it so significant?
2. Jack says, “…cattle aren’t people, that’s a fact” (this page). But in what ways in the novel are cattle like people, or vice versa?
3. What paral els can you draw between Jack and Tom and the earlier pair of Luxton brothers?
4. “To become the proprietor of the very opposite thing to that deep-rooted farmhouse. Holiday homes, on wheels.” (this page) What is Swift tel ing us through Jack’s observation?
5. What does their Caribbean holiday symbolize to El ie? To Jack?
6. Did Jack real y want to leave Devon, ten years earlier? If El ie hadn’t suggested the Isle of Wight, what do you think might have happened?
7. Before they move, Jack sel s the ancestral Luxton cradle, but keeps the shotgun and the medal. Why?
8. Madness comes up again and again—mad-cow disease, the madness of war, the possibility that Jack has gone mad. What point is Swift making?
9. Time shifts frequently over the course of the novel, hopscotching across decades. How does Swift use these shifts to expand and deepen the story?
10. Why does El ie refuse to accompany Jack back to Devon?
11. Why is putting down Luke such a pivotal act for Tom and Jack?
12. What do we learn when Swift shifts from Jack’s point of view to others’—Major Richards’s, the hearse driver’s, Bob Ireton’s? What do we learn from the brief section told from Tom’s perspective?
13. At several points, Swift writes extended hypothetical
passages—what
might
have
happened if one character had said or done something slightly different. What effect does this have? How does it help to ful y form the characters?
14. How does the Robinsons’ transformation of Jebb Farm work as a metaphor for twenty-first-century life?
15. “… anyone (including the owners of Jebb Farmhouse, had they been in occupation) might have seen two hand-prints on the top rail, one either side of the black-lettered name.” (this page) What do Jack’s hand-prints symbolize?
16. “Security” means different things to the Luxtons and the Robinsons. Which definition do you think Swift endorses?
17. What does the medal represent? What does it mean when Jack tosses it into the sea?
18. Does Tom real y believe El ie had a hand in Jimmy’s death? Why does he say it?
19. Tom’s ghost plays a major role in the novel’s final scene. What does he represent?
SUGGESTED READING
Saturday by Ian McEwan; A Week in December by Sebastian Faulks; Falling Man by Don DeLil o; The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes; The Gathering by Anne Enright; The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy.