Very strong characters and some sparkling dialogue make this a book that appears simple on the surface but actually talks about very difficult and heart breaking decisions that people make in life. Is it a gamble or can you make a better life?
Swift doesn’t really answer this but on the journey you have lots of chances to consider your own life and your friends too!
Only slight quibble was that the day must have had about 24 hours of daylight in it to cram in the proceedings.
Very very enjoyable and emotional read.

This was a character study so it won't be everyone's taste. Most of the narrative is set in one day following four men on a road trip to scatter the ashes of a fifth man. Along the way, we read from each man's perspective as well as get flashbacks to get deeper understanding of their complex relationships.
Swift did a good job of setting up a web of deceit and duplicity shrouded under the worn faces of middle aged to elderly characters, and used it to comment on friendship and marriage but also risk taking and the price of compromise.

Characters

Jack Arthur Dodds (deceased) - "Dodds and Son Family Butcher, since 1903".
Vince Dodds (Vincent Ian Pritchett) - "son" of Jack and Amy. "Dodds' Autos"
Ray "Lucky" Johnson - "...if you want to put a bet on, he's your man".
Lenny Tate, Grocer - "Gunner Tate, middleweight. Always pissed. Always late".
Vic Tucker, Funeral Director - "...at your disposal".
Amy Dodds - Jack's wife, mother of June (mentally disabled). "...it was hop picking that started it....It's all pickings."
Mandy Black - wife of Vince. "...a lassie from Lancashire".

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This is a beautiful book. Beautifully written, beautifully controlled. It is about the ordinary lives of ordinary people, and the mixture of accident and circumstances which shapes such lives. Commonplace events, personal tragedies, laughter, love and death are all part of their shared memories. But faced with the blunt reality of death, these memories seem like small eddies in the flow of events which have brought them to this present moment. Could they have changed anything? Can they change anything now?

Last Orders shows Graham Swift writing at his best, and he well deserves the nomination for the Booker Prize. The atmosphere he builds up as the book progresses is one of thoughtful reverie, which I found so absorbing that I was irritated by anything which distracted me from the book and broke the spell. It is a simple story, simply told, but one which has great depths.

The story begins in an East London pub. And Jack Dodds, dead and alive, is present from the start right up to the final moment when his ashes are carried away by the wind at the end of Margate Pier. It is Jack's boxed ashes which bring his family and friends together in their favourite Bermondsy pub; and it is this heavy box and its contents which prompt their reminiscences on the car ride to the South Coast town of Margate. Shared memories overlap as the trip to Margate progresses, and in the forced intimacy of the car, old grudges re-surface and cause unexpected diversions. But finally, Jack's 'last orders' for the disposal of his ashes are carried out - more or less as he directed.

For various reasons, Ray was probably the closest of Jack's friends. And it is Ray's thoughts that we hear most frequently as we follow the inner and outer journeys of the various characters. Like the others, Ray speaks a vernacular which Swift captures subtly and skilfully, without tricks or exaggeration. For a page or two, the language struck me as strange, but it was soon so familiar that it seemed completely normal. Since I grew up close to this part of London, it was speech which was well known to me, and I felt that I knew these people and shared something of their background and histories. But Swift never makes his English setting or its history intrusive, so his people and their thoughts, actions and memories are simply human and, as such, are understandable to all.

In fact, the very ordinariness of the characters made it difficult, at first, for me to distinguish one voice from another, and I found myself checking the chapter headings to see who was speaking. Recognition grew from small accretions of signs as the story progressed, and very soon I was familiar with the particular character traits of particular speakers: Lenny's antagonism towards Vince, for example; Vince's obsession with cars; and Vic's dry, matter-of-fact view of life and death, and his odd sense of humour. Like other aspects of this book, the slow, simple approach added to the 'realness' of the story, rather as in one of Mike Leigh's films.

It would have been very easy for Swift to create vivid, distinctive characters, as he has done before, but his gentle, understated approach is an essential part of the gradual intensifying of atmosphere which he achieves so well. It invites us to contemplate the course of our own lives. And it is also completely consistent with the old butchers' wisdom that Jack Dodds, towards the end of the book, recalls for us, just as he heard it from his father. It is advice which I think Swift intends us all to apply to our lives:

I had to reread this for my book club, and chose the audio version. I also cheated, looked up the cast of the movie on imdb, and thus was able to more closely identify the characters, as there are numerous first person accounts. Thus, the book really fell into focus for me, the narrators' stories packed more of a punch.

I feel the need with this review to point out that my rating has to do with how much I enjoyed the book/how much I got out of it rather than how I would rate the book as a piece of literature, capable of standing the test of time, etc. This is a technically accomplished novel, interesting characterization, but it just didn't do it for me. It was too straightforward with the narrative to interest me on that score and the characters created, while feeling quite true to life with all their faults and foibles, were not people I wanted to spend time with. I enjoy books that I can feel a sense of awe about the piece of art created or that I enjoy being immersed in, sharing the world with the characters or being inside those characters' heads. I didn't feel that here.

Meh far from my favorite Man Booker - not even my favorite Graham Swift! Mothering Sunday of his was so much better, as was Waterland. And Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace was passed over for this? Um wrong.

Interesting premise - bunch of old friends meet up at a pub to scatter ashes of deceased Jack Dodds. I'm not sure why it's so bizarre that he has asked for his ashes to be scattered off the pier? He does a nice job of slowly revealing the lives as they intertwined over the years, but it's just really not that interesting.

This was the next addition in my Booker Prize Challenge, and continued on a theme started by Pat Barker where the experiences of young British men at war are prioritised. In this one, flashbacks are presented as vignettes interpolated across a present day trip to the sea to scatter the ashes of a friend, and stories of how their domestic lives have crossed.

I found this book to be moving, and/but challenging. If I was starting again I would keep a register of names and events, as the short chapters and rapidly shifting narrators result in potential for confusion. It was often only half way through a story that I would realise which narrator was speaking, what their place in the narrative was, and what time period they were referring to. This made it hard to really ‘feel’ chunks of the story as intellectual acrobatics had to be done first!

Having said that, the text is dripping with emotion conveyed through a matter-of-fact world weariness. So much is expressed through allusion and passing reference, in passive voice and spare details. In particular, some of the vignettes focusing on the war were breathtaking in their short, understated perfection.

This book is soaked in regret and pathos. Don’t read it for a fun time. Read it as a warning of what life could be like when you are old, unless you take your chances now.

Full of deceptively ordinary people with their little adventures, secrets and compromises, truths and lies, uninteresting lives and professions, and the very language hey speak in; 'Last Orders' brilliantly captures life few books ever manage to. Those are the people that you are likely to meet in your life - butchers, car dealers, insurance agents etc. The things they will do for their families and friends which show their character and courage will go unnoticed by the rest of the world.

Awesome as the book is, it is difficult to read - despite the very simple story. You want a character guide in your hand before you start it - book launches into story with out making any introductions to its characters. It doesn't help that the story is narrated by different characters and keeps on jumping back and forth in time.

2.5

"I'd like to be all kinds of people....but I can't because I'm me....I don't want to be like me, I want to be like them but I can't I can't I can't."

It took me about one third of the book to straighten out the characters in my mind. I was thinking I should go back and re-read the beginning, but now I think it was better that all the stories were jumbled and then clarified. Or somewhat clarified. The characters themselves have not sorted out their relationships or their pasts either.

Each short chapter is a reflection conjured by the death of Jack Dodds and his request that his ashes be thrown into the sea. His estranged adopted son and his 3 drinking buddies set out to fulfill his last wish, confronting along the way their tangled relations with Jack, each other, their families, and the doors they have opened and shut. Also speaking, but deliberately absent from the journey, are some of the women in their lives, particularly Jack's wife Amy.

There is regret and anger, but also, underneath and despite it all, attachment, dependence, and love. Jack's life and death and choices mingle with their own. Could they have actually done things that differently? And what if they had? Would it even have mattered?

I loved this almost as much as Mothering Sunday. This one is very male-focused, populated by a group of bumbling, inarticulate, hard-drinking Londoners on a road trip to scatter their friend Jack's ashes, each man's grief complicated by tangles of Jack-related secrets. The polyphonic audio version is amazing. It took me a while to get into it, but the intensity gathered and gathered and cracked me wide open.

This uneventful novel was the Booker Prize winner of 1996. I glimpsed fleeting moments of literary excellence but the book's prosaic conversational style wasn't for me.
It also pained me to see ain't without its apostrophe on almost every page! Aint that annoying?