let's stop in for a pint. jack would've wanted it. jack would've expected it.



brilliant.

4.5 stars. An engaging character based novel about some ordinary, flawed people in England who knew Jack Dodds. Jack was a butcher who died from cancer. His friends, Ray Johnson, Lenny Tate, Vic Tucker and Vince Dodds decide to travel to the coast at Margate to scatter Jack’s ashes into the sea. Each character tells their stories as internal monologues and through their conversations. Jack, Lenny, Vic and Ray all served in the army during World War Two. They all wished for careers other than what they ended up doing and have troubled relationships with women.

Along with descriptions of the journey to Margate, we learn about each of the men and Amy Dodds, Jack’s wife, and Mandy Dodds, Jack’s foster daughter.

All the characters have interesting stories to relate about their lives.

Highly recommended.

This book was the 1996 Booker Prize winner.

Wow men really have so much time on their hands from doing zero emotional labour or housework that they can really fill their heads with pints, betting and sleeping with their friends wives!!!!

No but real talk, beginning was good and end was good. Middle a bit of a slog. This won the Booker prize in ‘96 so another ticked off in my personal challenge. And fun fact my grandad played Lenny in the movie adaption of this book! So that felt nice.

Disappointed but not surprised.
I can overlook many things, but a man implying that he would fuck his own daughter ain't one. :)

My negative for this is largely due to my own lack of knowledge rather than the work itself. I think if I had been familiar with London and its environs my appreciation would be greater. It begins in Bermondsey. A Google search tells me it is one of the oldest areas of south London, but even that doesn't tell me what I think locals would know. From the story, I gather it is more of a working class neighborhood - but I gathered that from reading, not from foreknowledge. Foreknowledge would have better informed me about the men who people this novel and more fully fleshed them.

That aside, I liked this story and the men as I came to know them. The chapters are voiced by the four men who take Jack Dodd's ashes to the sea and by his wife, Amy Dodd. The story begins It aint like your regular sort of day and takes place in that single day. Throughout the men (and Amy) talk about their lifelong relationship with Jack. The tone is entirely conversational in addition to the actual dialog. We aint here to do the honours and pay respects to Jack because he worked so hard on his own nature he turned into something else. We're here because he was Jack. The characterizations might not be as clearly defined as I might have wanted, but there are differences between them. I think many would find more humor in this than I did.

I was not as enamored of this as I was his Waterland, but I'm glad I read it. I've given it 4 stars, but it probably lies in the bottom quarter of that range.

Jack, a Butcher and propper up of the bar at his local (alongside his mates Raysy, Lenny, Vic and Vince, Jack's unofficially adopted son) dies. He wants his ashes scattered off Margate. His widow, Amy, passes the batton/urn to Jack's mates, who all have a soft spot for Amy. They set off from Bermondsey to Margate in Vince's flash car (he's a second hand car dealer and mechanic)for this purpose.

The story of their pilgrimage is endearingly human, sometimes tense, often funny, almost always full of emotion. Each of the main characters tells their stories throughout the book - a chapter here, a chapter there, until the reader has built up a picture of their lives and how they interact, or otherwise, with each other.

Well written, very human and enjoyable.

I actually enjoyed the short chapters told from different points of view. In fact, there was one really funny, really short chapter. Sadly, I also felt that the book, despite its excellent tone and prose was about 125 pages too long.

This book made me cry. Seriously. So you know that it is going straight to the list of best reads of the year. For real. Which is surprising because the narrative structure of the book is one that I typically don't like. The story is told from a multiperspectival point of view, with chapters being named for the person who is narrating that chapter, or, from where the events in the chapter are taking place, in which case Ray is the narrator. This isn't my favorite narrative style, but for this story it works once I got past thinking about the structure.

I'm teaching this book in one of my classes this fall and there are so many interesting things that I think we'll be able to talk about. But one of the things that resonates with me most in this book is the idea of estrangement from the people that we love as well as the idea of alienation. All of the characters, with the exception of Vic--which is interesting in and of itself and for whom I have a theory--are estranged in some way from the people that they love, mainly their children, and it seems that they are all on a journey of some kind to either rectify that estrangement or come to terms with that estrangement. To in some way let go and find a way to start over. Yet they also all realize, to varying degrees, that we can't start from scratch. New beginnings can't erase what came before, nor can we start over and become new people. There's a line near the end and it says something like "old people, new people, the same people" and that is exactly who many of the characters are at the close of the novel--they are the same, and yet the are different, and they are different because they have been changed by the journey that they have taken during the course of the novel.

Vic seems to be the exception to the estrangement and alienation rule. There's a point where one of the characters--I think it's Ray--reflects that Vic knows who he is and has never wanted to be anyone else or do another job. I think this is because Vic isn't estranged from his loved ones. His sons have agreed to go into the family business and inherit and run it when he dies. He has a wife who accepts him for who he is--made all the more poignant because we get a flashback of Vic telling her what his profession is--undertaker--and his certainty that she will turn away from him and decide she doesn't want to be with him after all, but she doesn't, and she even finds a positive in the fact that he's an undertaker. Vic, unlike all the other characters, isn't really on a journey--he's not really altered by this trip to the sea to scatter a friend's ashes. I don't know because I haven't fully processed the book in my mind but Vic's character is intriguing in so many ways and I just want to think more about that.

Anyway, the novel is fantastic, which is surprising because I didn't think I was going to like it at first. This is another of those books that starts at slowly but I was so glad that I stuck with it and got to the end because it was just so well worth it.

This is one of those books where I could not decide if I like it until after I had finished reading it and thought about the book. It took me some time to get used to the language and Swift's style of writing. The book is told in various characters point of view. This actually was what I enjoyed most about the book. There are a lot of characters and people to keep track of. It took me some time to figure out who everyone was in relation to other characters in the book. In the end, I liked it but I didn't love it. I do think the title was clever. Last orders, most of the characters in this book are carrying out the Last Orders of their deceased friend (where to spread his ashes) while at the same time Last Orders is what is called at their favorite pub close to closing time.

Enjoyable read with an interesting structure and insight to the struggles of older men to deal with their emotions and relationships. The constant jumping around between characters’ perspectives took me a while to get a grip of (especially those with similar names) and meant it took some time to become engaged, but it was worth it in the end.

There’s a time and a place. I am at that place and this is the right time. A wonderfully long thought process.

I have been disappointed with Booker Award winners in the past, but this winner from 1996 was deeply satisfying to me.

My only reason for not giving it five stars is that I felt it was harder than it needed to be to learn the identities and backgrounds of the main characters and keep track of the time hopping that went on, even though I know that was a key to the novel's construction.

The story is built around a last wish by butcher Jack Dodds that his ashes be scattered off the end of Margate Pier into the ocean, and four of his longtime mates, who usually gathered each day at a south London pub, undertake the journey. It is clear from the beginning that there is tension in the car as they head toward the ocean, particularly between fruit and veg seller Lenny and the younger driver, car dealer Vince, who is Jack's adopted son. The putative leader of the group is Vic, the local undertaker, but the key player is the fourth passenger, Ray, who served with Jack in North Africa in Word War II and has a deep, entangled history with Jack and his family.

As the story unfolds, short people-centered chapters provide flashbacks that show all of the connections, small triumphs and disappointments that bind these men and their women together. There are abandoned children, children who are estranged, affairs, pressure to adopt their fathers' professions, and above all else, a search for the identities they want, compared with those that their families or their society had seemed to prescribe for them.

I don't want to spoil what you learn, but suffice to say that Jack and his wife Amy are central to the way everyone's lives have developed.

The stories of these families, told completely in vernacular, reveal their interleaved lives, and it all culminates with their stormy and circuitous journey to the sea with Jack's remains.