19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Moment of Ultimate Truth, January 26, 2000
This review is from: Last Orders (Paperback)
Last orders (either in a pub before its closing-time or in one's lifetime before its termination) is a moment of final decision, a moment of ultimate truth. Everyone who has faced in their life a death of any intimate person - a friend or relative - comes to a conclusion that funeral rites are intended not for the deceased (who is already in some other place, far from this mortal coil) but for those who are still alive. Death of every person portends personal departure and compels to appraise their own life, to encounter the truth, at least tacitly. The novel of Graham Swift is the most perfect description (I've ever read) of that painful process.
Before his death Jack Dodd ordered to scatter his ashes into the ocean from Margate Pier. His three intimate friends and adopted son perform the order. Their (and some other person's) short conversations, intertwined memories and interdependent thoughts during this trip from London to Margate polyphonically form the story - warmth of human love and compassion, bitterness of mutual misunderstanding and disappointment, unrealized dreams, ambiguity of love&hate relations between father and son, - all that molds individual lives. It is significant that their way lies through Canterbury and its Cathedral, for self-comprehension is impossible without personal repentance and vindication of another's sins and misdeeds. The last chapter of the book is surprisingly calm: the human harmony undisturbed by berserk weather gives hope that accomplished mission was not in vain.
Author's mastery in representing distinct voices of his heroes surpasses every praise. Those, for whom English is only second language (as for me),at first can be perplexed by abundance of slang terms and indigenous allusions. Please make efforts and you will be rewarded galore. Do not hasten to discern all personal interrelations from the first pages, believe the author, he will skillfully relate everything. Similar to a frozen window-glass gradually clearing one's vision with every movement of one's warm hand, each narrator of the story will tell their perception of events. If in the end something stays a bit fuzzy or blurred, it is not author's fault - such is our real life where absolute knowledge is unattainable. An excellent and justly awarded novel.
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Poignant and graceful, September 30, 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: Last Orders (Paperback)
Graham Swift's "Last Orders" is a beautifully written novel about how the life-long friends of a recently deceased come together to carry out his last wishes to have his ashes scattered at a seaside town. Told through the eyes of his wife and buddies, the vantage point shifts from one to the other, as family secrets, private pains, hopes and aspirations are revealed through their alternating rumination. The dialogue (if you can describe the barely literate half slurred half spat sentences that spew from their mouths as dialogue) is authentic and evocative of the working class milieu. There is also a gentleness and grace about the reflections of the ensemble cast that lend a special poignance to this "boys tale". Though their talk centre on drinking and betting and male bonding type activities, it is the revelation of their domestic lives and their problems with wives and children that shape the novel. In as much as I derived great reading pleasure and would recommend the book highly to friends, I also found certain aspects of it frustrating. If Swift had been less obscure and more directly explanatory about some of the characters, it would have made for a tighter and more satisfying read and deserved a full five-star rating.
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17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Left me dissatisfied, January 16, 1998
By A Customer
This review is from: Last Orders (Paperback)
I think I must be missing something.
Perhaps because I'm a girl, and this is a story of male loves and friendships, I found this book profoundly unsatisfying. It should have pushed all the right buttons - the story of four friends going to scatter the ashes of the man whose presence interwove their lives. With a premise like that, and an author as lyrical as Swift, it should have been a deep and moving meditation on mortality and the patterns that make up our lives.
But it wasn't.
Or, at least, I didn't find it so. Judging by the host of commendations it received, this was my fault, not the book's.
For me, though, this book fell down in a number of concrete ways.
The story is told through several voices, but I found three of the main voices, Len, Vic and Ray difficult to differentiate. (Perhaps, said the voice inside me which believes the Booker Prize judges, he was trying to say that they're very similar people really. Maybe, but if so, this was a confusing way to do it.)
The characters were incredibly articulate about their feelings internally, but extremely inarticulate towards one another. (The voice of the Booker Prize said - ah, this is a marvellous truth - the things left unspoken, the words we can never say.... But my own taste said - this doesn't make sense. The fact that they think one thing and then say something completely different to each other just makes it seem that they're lying.)
It seemed unrealistic that the lives of these people would be so heavily dependent on one another. (The Booker Prize said - beautiful! The interweaving of one person's life with another - the unintended effects...)
What can I say? I wish I could point to a single glaring fault and say "that just ruined it for me," but I can't. Everything that the Booker Prize says is true, and yet it just didn't strike me that way.
From reading what others have written here, it seems that there is a definite split, which comforts me because, in the final analysis, what I saw here was a book that would have been meditative and thoughtful if it had had anything to meditate on or think about.
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