Wish You Were Here – Graham Swift

In his masterpiece Waterland, Swift adopts a narrative strategy involving multiple plot strands and timelines that twist around each other to brilliant effect. Wish You Were Here attempts a similar feat but, rather than the strands tightening to a coherent whole, they somehow dissipate.

The plot revolves around the return of a soldier’s body from Iraq, an event that triggers various family revelations and resonates with other news events, particularly BSE and the subsequent mass slaughter of cattle. The focus on Devonian rural folk in a miserable cycle of poverty and suicide inevitably recalls Hardy.

The best sequence describes the repatriation ceremony when the coffin arrives at a military airbase, a commonly seen media image that I will now look at with new eyes.

The books major misstep is in an unforgivably clichéd minor character, a financial whiz called Toby who cares only about money and is having an extramarital affair with his PA. Puh-lease.