An onion layered book of loss, relationship complexity, foundering trust, questionable loyalties, plenty of darker toned themes. But it’s not a book that took me down.

For all its turns and judders, it reads rather simply and matter of factly, oddly comfortably.

I found it often enough insightful, poignant, or beautifully phrased, yet always real rather than manufactured.

One detail that I oddly enjoyed was the choice of vocations for each character and how that fit with the literal and metaphorical elements of the unfolding story. Small details like that can add a lot to the reading experience, and this book had a number of them.

Not un-missable, but still recommended.

I'm not sure I can find a fault in this novel. I didn't expect to love book about crazy old people on mission to scatter the ashes of their deceased friend, but I did. All different POVs, thoughts, history, troubles going way back into their youth, lives never lived to the fullest, failures and wrong choices are what can happen to every one of us. Story of missed chances, having no choice, or making a wrong one, being happy with who you have been all your life and questioning whether that person is really you, and where have your dreams gone? Believable and faulty, characters came to life in front of my eyes and I felt so sorry for them and their wasted lives and sorrows and guilt and everything a human being can feel. It was beautifully written, so simple and yet so complex underneath the surface, I love it.

When this book won the Booker prize, there was a ridiculous debate about plagiarism, the gist of which that this book has a similar plot to William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and is similarly written in chapters focusing on the thoughts of the various protagonists - the carpers clearly missed the point that there was an element of homage about the whole thing. Swift is a fine writer, and this was an enjoyable read, if a little elegiac and mournful.

Last Orders by Graham Swift


Last Orders is a fabulous, breathtaking, entrancing, dazzling chef d’oeuvre that may although escape the attention of some unprepared readers, this was anyway the case with the undersigned.

Generally, one reads a transfixing book and when the motion picture based on it comes to the cinemas, the bookworm travel to the theater and he or she generally manifests a light or serious disappointment with the adaptation.
Last Orders could be the exception to the rule, for at least in one case, the film written and directed by Fred Shepisi, featuring Michael Caine, Bob Hoskins, Tom Courtenay, Helen Mirren, David Hemmings, Kelly Reilly and last but not least Ray Winstone, made one look for the novel to savor it with gusto.

On the first attempt, the 1996 Booker Prize Winner, may deter someone who intends to read a positive book, for we soon learn about one of the main protagonists of the narrative, Jack Dodds, who is now packed in a jar…seeing as he was cremated and is now on the chair of the Coach bar, where his friends and son are ready to take him to Margate, where his last wish was to be scattered on the pier.
On the issue of the said son, things are more complicated, for Vince had actually been adopted by Jack and his wife Amy, as he was orphaned in the war, with Jack determined to get him to work in the butcher shop called for good reason he thought Dodds an son, only the adopted rebel would rather join the army than work as a butcher.

When Vince decides to dress in uniform and travel to Aden, there were also complications with Lenny “Gunner” Tate’s daughter, who had been left pregnant by the disloyal, irresponsible young man, who would later marry under outré circumstances, a woman taken from the street by his father, given shelter in the house and then joining the prodigal son in a caravan that belonged to what could be the most important personage in the tale- Ray “Lucky” Johnson.
The latter has known Jack from the days of the World War II, during which they have fought together in the desert, near the Pyramids where they took photographs riding on a camel and the brothels where the bigger man took his fortunate friend to have his first intercourse with a woman, in Cairo.

Ray has a look at the photo of Amy and he falls in love with the woman that will become his mistress, many years later, after she will have given up on her husband, who never wanted to accept, visit and have a nice word for their biological, retarded daughter who would spend all of her life in a special home, which the writer says that is actually an asylum, in spite of the fancy, deceptive names that they get nowadays.

As they travel to Margate from Bermondsey to fulfill the departed’s last wishes, the three sons and the estranged son recall various stories, some of which they share with the others, but they mostly keep to themselves.
Ray thinks about the bets he has placed in his life, in which one of his passions, maybe the main one, has been the race track and betting, the last one being an especially important and fruitful one, as he took one thousand pounds, which Jack had asked from his son, and placed it on a very unlikely winner, which had a very advantageous rating and he won about thirty thousand pounds, that may take him and Amy to…Australia.

Lucky is not fortunate in his personal life, which is evidently much more important than the races, for after his daughter has decided to travel to and settle in Australia, from where she would not communicate with her parent for more than twenty years, his wife leaves him and he is now alone in the world.
He has had a period during which he took Amy in his camper van to see her intellectually disabled daughter, where they are once observed by the other friend, the funeral director Vi Tucker, and then his best friend’s wife may feel pity for the little man, the reason is not clear, but the fact is that they have an affair.

When Vince returns from Aden, Amy says that they must stop their relationship and she keeps seeing the now grown woman, twice a week, even if she never says a word and at the age of fifty she probably has no idea that her mother has spent a year of her life, cumulating all the visits, trying to talk to her…indeed she most likely has no idea she has a mother and probably entertains no notion at all.
Vince Dodds has been a rebel and he is now the owner and operator of what he calls Dodds Motors, but the others still refer to as a garage, and he has always had an obsession with cars that he feels that they are so fantastic as to be able to bring joy, with the ability to allow men to travel and make them so powerful and blissful.

He has been helped by Ray, who thought that he shows gratitude for Jack’s support during the war by standing by his son, only to find that his efforts had the opposite effect since the butcher wanted his son to work with him in the shop and felt aggravated when his friend gave the plot of land on which the Motors will be built.
Vince has a daughter and he feels remorse at having in a way sold her to a rich client, a man that he resents with something which is close to if not identified as racism, with his continuous violent talk about those that they used to shoot at and kill in Aden and are now flaunting their new found riches.

The former boxer, who is now in his late sixties, Lenny the former “Gunner” comes to blows with Vince, on their way to Margate and it is not just on account of the abandoned daughter, who has had a very hard time, considering she is now married to a convicted criminal and has to go and see him in prison.
Lenny and probably the other friends entertain the notion that Vince has never paid the debt to his adoptive father, except perhaps in bitterness and resentment for being bullied, as he seems to have seen it, into joining a business for which he feels nothing but contempt, seeing as he is sure that cars are the future, mobility is the new Secret of civilization and people will keep buying cars that Vince will always be there to provide.

Last Orders is a glorious novel.

One of my favourite novels. I'm going to quote in full a short essay by John Carey to tell you why. He said it all first, and said it best. (Bastard.)

Graham Swift's 1996 Booker Prize winner, the last of my fifty choices, looks back across the century. Ray, Lenny and Vic, three regulars from the Coach and Horses pub in Bermondsey, are on their way to Margate to fulfil the last wish of their old mate Jack, which was to have his ashes thrown into the sea from Margate pier. Vince, Jack's stepson, is driving them. Ray is an insurance clerk and a serious student of the turf; Lenny is in fruit and veg; Vic is an undertaker. Jack owned a butcher's shop, and wanted Vince to go into the family firm, but Vince had classier ideas and now sells luxury cars to oil-rich Arabs.

As they make for the coast in Vince's blue Mercedes, Swift unreels their past lives in snatches of talk and internal monologue. Now one of them, now another, takes up the narrative, passing it round as they pass round and nurse on their knees the plastic crematorium jar holding what is left of Jack. In flashbacks, Jack and his wife Amy add their voices to the gathering memories.

It is the wartime generation Swift celebrates. Jack and Ray were at El Alamein together, and Jack saved Ray's life. Lenny was a gunner, Vic served with convoys. They spent their youth in a pastoral England quite close in time but unimaginably different from ours. Jack and Amy met on a hop-picking holiday in Kent. Ray's old man was a scrap merchant with a cart horse called Duke which hauled a wagon round the Bermondsey streets. (Ray remembers that it was sitting beside his dad, watching Duke's backside, that first gave him thoughts about women - a connection typical of the book's fascination with how the mind knits itself.)

Seemingly artless, but as precise as a string quartet, the story gradually fits together. Just before war broke out, Jack and Amy had a daughter, June, who was born brain-damaged. She is still alive - now a woman of fifty - in an institution, but has never shown the least flicker of mental awareness. Twice a week, without fail, year in year out, Amy has visited her, hoping to stir some sort of recognition. But Jack has never been able to acknowledge her existence or hear her name mentioned.

The bitterness that grew between Jack and Amy carried benefits for others. At the end of the war they adopted baby Vince, whose family had been wiped out by a flying bomb, to fill the gap left by June. Later Ray, ever the opportunist, waylaid Amy on one of her hospital visiting days, and they had a short but blissful affair, consummating their love inside his camper-van at a number of classic race-meetings while the crowd roared outside.

The intimacy and depth of the writing imprints each character indelibly - Jack, dying of stomach cancer and sprouting plastic tubes, still chatting up the nurses; Vic savouring the secrets of the undertaker's craft; Lenny, an ex-boxer, needling Vince who, years back, got Lenny's teenage daughter pregnant and threw her over. Vince is the hardest character to like, but the book's generosity extends even to him, showing us behind the spiv a bewildered child, laughed at at school, and an adolescent caught up in Jack and Amy's grievances.

What they are all trying to do is take in the ungraspable fact of death - a subject too old, you would think, for novelty, yet Swift addresses it with searching freshness. Ray, at the crematorium, feels that none of it has anything to do with Jack - the velvet curtains, the flowers, the music. 'I stood there, looking at the curtains, trying to make it have to do with him.'

The novel's hero is the English language as spoken by ordinary people. There is not a phrase you might not hear in a Bermondsey pub any night of the week. Swift's own voice never interposes, and the connectives in the dialogue are kept basic ('I said...He said...'). Yet the effect is profoundly elegiac, proverbially wise, as rhythmic as the surge of waves.

Shakespeare occasionally gives lower-class characters speeches that shame the high-ups by their gentleness or nobility. But here that effect is carried through a whole book. Cockney speech becomes a vehicle for nuance and tenderness. If a language reflects the temper of its people, we should be proud of this book's language - or proud of the generation, now passing, that spoke it.

beter dan verwacht na de eerste 50 pagina's, een mooi verhaal over hoe levens aaneen hangen

I obtained this book for two reasons. Firstly I had just read and loved Swift's "Mothering Sunday". Secondly, at a Perth writers festival talk about her novel "The Weekend", Charlotte Wood mentioned that some readers compared it with "Last Orders" where men were on a similar task to the women in her book. Two good reasons which contributed to an interesting read.
I found "Last Orders" nowhere near the quality of "Mothering Sunday". I even found the characters hard to distinguish for the first few chapters and had to resort to constructing a mnemonic to keep them straight. I think the language of Swift's characters has been rightly praised for its working class authenticity, but it is all so much the same! And how did they ever manage to cope with the ritualised alcohol consumption?
I see the point of gender comparison/contrast but there are so many other differences between the two sets of characters, that I didn't make much of this. It's a shame, but I found both books disappointing.

An interesting non-linear character study of Jack, his four friends, and Amy, Jack's wife. Nearly all the men have daughters that have rejected them or been rejected by them. Jack and June's daughter is a central character although she never expresses a word and has no thoughts that we know of.

Recommended by my son. Someone told me you'll either love this book or hate it. I LOVED it! By the very last chapter I was beside myself with emotion. A good few times it made me laugh out loud. This book has everything but if you're looking for something fast paced and full of action you've come to the wrong book. It's slow paced and full of the complexities of ordinary people going a out their lives and their inter weaving relationships. A memorable story.

At first glance this seems such a simple tale, a man's dying wish is to have his ashes thrown into the sea of Margate pier and four drinking mates undertake this task making a few stops along the way but there is much more to it than that. Firstly all the characters are working class, we have Vic an undertaker, Ray an insurance broker and horse racing gambler, Lenny a fruit and veg man, Vince a second hand car salesman and of course the deceased Jack Dodds, a Master Butcher. Each man along with the widow Amy narrates part of the story each unraveling a little of theirs' and Jack's past. We get life and death,childhood and parenthood, loyalty and deception,work,regret and lost opportunities,in fact all the ingredients that makes up everyday life.

Initially I found the constant skipping from one narrator to another and from the past to the present a little baffling but soon got the hang of it and even began to enjoy these constant switches of emphasis. Despite the gloomy subject matter there was also a certain amount of humour which lightened the mood at times. I also enjoyed the author's writing style feeling that he had a good grasp and insight into his characters, the most poignant for me was strangely the one who didn't go, the widow. Instead she has her own journey to make, to visit and tell her mentally retarded daughter June that Jack has died, a daughter whom Jack has shunned practically all her life but whom it could be argued that in his choice of final resting place he finally acknowledges in death what he could not face in life.

However, for me, the final third of the book rather lets it down overall. This switches predominantly between the hospital ward and the home where June has lived most of her life, coupled with the meandering nature of the journey to Margate meant I felt that the tale got somewhat bogged down at times. That said I still enjoyed the book as a whole and will certainly look out for some of Swift's other works but a worthy winner of the Booker Prize? I'm not so sure.

Last Orders, Graham Swift’s Booker Prize winner of 1996, is about four drinking buddies. In extension, we learn of their wives and children too. One of the four, Jack, dies of stomach cancer. In his will he asks that his ashes be thrown off the pier at Margate. Three of his buddies and his adoptive son agree to do this, but not his wife. Of course, you ask why. The book follows their one day outing from their place of residence, Bermondsey, London, to Margate on the coast. The time setting is the 1980s. The trip is taken in a borrowed Mercedes. It is a symbolic farewell to their friend, and as such their mood is both nostalgic and elegiac, but they are not without misgivings. We observe what they say to each other and how they relate to each other. We are privy to their thoughts. We learn of past events through flashbacks.

We are given many characters and divergent points of view. Characters are not introduced. That would be out of place since they all know each other. They are connected by family and are longtime friends. Three are war veterans, sharing common experiences of the war. Names are thrown around, making it difficult at the start, because we are not one of them and so don’t know who is who. There is a heavy use of vernacular. Although this too accurately mirrors the situation, again, comprehension is made more difficult. I did not understand all that was said. This is not made easier listening to the audiobook since the dialect is emphasized.

The difficulties I had with the large cast of unintroduced characters and the vernacular are countered by lyrical, atmospheric and descriptive writing. The wind battered Margate pier, the pub where the buddies drink and the hospital setting where Jack lies dying are accurately and movingly drawn.

If I were to read the book a second time, knowing now who is who, perhaps I would reach a clearer understanding of the characters’ motivations. First time around, I am left with guesses. I believe the author is saying something about the shallowness of people’s relationships. He is pointing an accusatory finger at how we treat one another, even those closest to us. We do what social mores tell us we should do without thinking through if this actually makes sense. The book’s message is I believe closely tied to why Jack’s wife refuses to take part in the outing.

The audiobook is narrated by a cast of five--Sandra Duncan, Phil Davis, Simon Slater, Gareth Armstrong and David Timson. The male narrators correspond to the four men on the day’s trip. Their narrations vary little, one from the other. They stress rather than play down the vernacular. Their intention is to give a dramatic performance. This is not to my liking. For me, this hampers understanding. Sandra Duncan narrates the women’s sections. She speaks clearly and does not overdo the dialect. I like her narration best. Unfortunately, her portion is small. I have rated the narration performance two stars. The narrators do a good job, but I prefer less of a performance. I prefer one reader over many.


*************************
*Waterland 4 stars
*Last Orders 3 stars
*Mothering Sunday 4 stars

Desi se da mi se nimalo ne svidi neki nagrađeni roman. Nije to ni toliko retko. Ali obično mogu da shvatim zašto ga vole ljudi u komisiji. Kod Poslednje ture ne mogu. Ne vidim nijedan razlog da dobije Bukera.

Jedna prosečna priča o prolaznosti života, ispričana na ispodprosečan način, bez ikakvog stila, uz to i operisana od humora. Koliko puta možeš na jednu stranu nagurati "Džek kaže, Mendi kaže, Leni kaže, Vins kaže, kažem" (ovo su prepisani počeci 6 redova s početka knjige). A i to što sledi tim ponavljajućim rečima su potpuno obični dijalozi, kakve bi mogao čuti da sedneš par sati u prvo londonski pab na koji naletiš.