PositiveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)Swift’s method is to set down ordinary things so as to suggest something more. His style, following his characters, is casual and colloquial, as he smoothly propels the action. As well as being an old-fashioned story told in an old-fashioned style, Here We Are has an emotional reticence, a reluctance to stir the reader’s feelings too far beyond the rueful tears of a survivor. The dramas of 1959 are safely in the past, carefully selected and blurred by memory. The theme of lonely childhoods and the possibilities of adult love give the novel its benign purpose and melancholy charm.
