Customer Reviews

Last Orders

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(20)
3 star:		(12)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

The great flaw of this book is that is so BLATANTLY in style, form and plot, an out-and-out rip-off of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying.-For those of you unfamiliar with the Faulkner novel, briefly: It concerns a family of working class whites carrying a coffin across the wilds of the Southeastern United States. Each short chapter is headed up by one of the character's names (e.g., Vardamen), and the lyrical interior monologue prose for which Faulkner is famous is written in a working class dialect not so easy to decipher sometimes even for a reader raised in South Carolina! - Sound familiar?...

I think this book was awarded the Booker Prize as sort of an apology for not giving it to Swift's Waterland...
Nevertheless, the book is good. I guess if you go along with the famous Picasso quote that, "Mediocre artists plagiarize. Great artists steal." then I guess none of the above will bother you. Despite the superficial overtones of mortality and death, the theme is really that recurring Proustian one in Swift's work: The elusiveness of Reality. As Vic meditates (p.216), "You see all the dead, all the bent or broken or plain stretched-out dead, and you think, These people are strangers now, total strangers. But it's the living who are strangers, it's the living whose shapes you can't ever guess."

Pretty good stuff. I mean, you could do a lot worse than this book, a whole lot worse...

Only three stars for a Booker prizewinner? The underlying story of this is good: four men, septuagenarians mostly, go from London to Margate to throw the ashes of one of their friends into the sea, their journey punctuated by memories of their intertwining lives over the previous fifty years. Despite betrayals and resentments, despite the fact that none of the men have done especially well for themselves, this is a story of the type normally hailed as life-affirming.

However, it is a very difficult tale to follow, even for a Brit, as I am; it must be even harder for an American. You have to know the dialect and, within it, to pick up the slight differences in voice between the various narrators. You have to know the geography, especially the social geography, of South London and North Kent. You have to keep the time-frame straight as it zigzags around over five decades. And you have to remember the relationships between a cast of characters all of whom have typically simple but barely memorable names, such as Jack, Vic, Vince, Ray, Lenny, Kath, Sally, and Susie, many of which also appear in familiar variants. It took me a while to get the major characters straight, but I can't say even now that I am sure which of the women is whose wife, whose lover, or whose daughter.

All the same, the underlying positive mood comes through, and it may well be worth sticking with these folks on their journey; just don't expect an easy trip.

The death of a friend brings about a dual state of mentally replaying the role that person had in our life and introspection. Graham Swift makes an amazing novel out of that fact, telling a story, in first person narrative, from no less than six perspectives jumping in temporal chaos. The result is an admittedly confusing patchwork of stories, philosophies, and feelings that when stiched together at the end form a broad and comforting quilt.

To be succinct, it is amazingly powerful. Graham weaves his quilt from the lives of six people; three of whom are friends and one the son of a dead man who's dying wish is to have his ashes scattered near Dreamland.

Stylistically, the first person narrative is effective partly because it reveals more in what it does not say, than what it specifically does say. The deep depths of the characters are drawn not directly from the words printed, but instead from their disjointed interactions. Forgiveness is offered between characters a hundred pages before the foul is executed. Regret is shown not in a meladramatic death soliliquy, but instead in the choice of a final resting place. Unlike other fiction works, this style requires time to savor and concentrate. To steal an idea from a friend, this is gourmet literature, not fast food.

Everyone will take away their own ideas about what this book is really "about" at a deeper level, but I think at its heart this novel is about taking care in choosing which bits of life should be retained and which should be discarded. When we truly dispose of the living and the dead, they are gone forever.

There's a very authentic feel to the individual voices of Swift's characters in Last Orders that gives this novel its charm. The British common man accents jump off the page. These are real people, nothing fake about them. All of them simple people, really, but at the same time their is an emotional complexity to each of them that makes them very human. I really liked the way Swift switches narrative voices every couple of pages. It gave the book variety, a strong pace, and added depth to the story. My only complaint is that there were passages where I felt a little more background about the secondary characters in the novel - women, all of them - would have been appropriate. It took a while to put all the pieces together to figure out just who they were and how they related to the main characters. I think I would have better appreciated their purpose in the story if their characters had been given more depth.

All in all, this is a charming novel about friendship, about the bonds between men, and about grieving. It's impressive that Swift was able to infuse so much tenderness into a novel with no female main characters.

Part way through the book, I paused and thought about these messed-up lives and unexpressed emotions, then it occurred to me that these guys are just like everyone I know. To me, this is why I found the voices so authentic. I am Vince's age and shared his attitude toward those of his father's generation. There is little narration and much stream of conscious thinking which makes the book, at times, hard to follow. Develop a score card of characters and relationships early since it does get confusing. Ultimately the four stars are for the implicit language which limits the scope of the book somewhat. Although the dialog is onviously authentic, I know that I missed some things since I am not from the neighborhood and the dialog almost assumes that a reader must be from nearby.

Ray, an aging punter whose wife left him years ago, sits at the bar of the Coach and Horses pub in Bermondsey. "It aint like your regular sort of day . . . That's why I'm here, five minutes after opening, for a little silent pow-wow with a pint glass."

Ray is joined by his long-time friend, Lenny, and then by Vic, who arrives carrying a box. "He twists the box round so we can see there's a white card sellotaped to one side. There's a date and a number and name: Jack Arthur Dodds." These three friends are soon joined by another, Vince, to scatter the remains of a man they have known since World War II.

Thus begins "Last Orders," Graham Swift's masterfully written Booker Prize winning novel about the day that four old friends carry out the final wish of Jack Dodds, scattering his remains into the surging ocean at the Margate pier. Along the way, driving from Bermondsey to Margate in a big old Mercury, with stops at a naval memorial in Chatham, the Canterbury Cathedral, and a few more pubs, we learn the intimate history of their lives, their friendships and their unfulfilled dreams.

"Last Orders" is written in language that brilliantly captures the thoughts, the feelings and the unfulfilled yearnings of its characters, that vividly paints a picture of the subtle, yet profound, ways in which ordinary lives become intertwined and meaningful. It is a novel marked by humor, but also by a subdued, bittersweet melancholy. While written in the first person, the voices are ever-shifting as the narrative moves from character to character, place to place, backward and forward in time. It is a remarkable narrative achievement, but also one that demands the reader's utmost attention.

Graham Swift's impressive use of the first person point of view throughout the story, with a central voice (Ray Johnson) and a number of other characters assuming the narrative voice in quick succession, in a sort of revolving point of view, succeeds in giving the story vibrancy and the characters believability. This device, along with the short sometimes clipped chapters, contributes to the feeling of forward movement that characterizes the story of four men from Bermondsey on a journey to carry out a deceased friend's last wishes (orders). Having once lived in Bermondsey , I easily recognized its people in Swift's characters, I was able to identify my day-to-day life there with their descriptions of their own day-to-day lives there, and I heard their distinctive voices loud and clear throughout the book.