Last Orders - SIGNED

It rook some convoluted turns but it mostly dragged.

The copy that arrived yesterday looks like it was dropped onto its back corner where many pages are bent over in a triangle. I do not think this is a Very Good copy. Acceptable would be a more accurate assessment. I have not yet had the opportunity to read the book, however.

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.

When I picked up this book, I thought it was going to be about friendship. It is much more than that. Using the technique of having snippets (some very amusing) from different points of view we learn, bit by bit, brush stroke by brush stroke, more and more about each of the characters. Are they wonderful and exciting? Not really. Are they worth spending time with? Definitely, as they are eminently human. And as we learn more and more, this book becomes increasingly existential in nature. While each of the characters is dealing with Jack's death, it becomes a book about life, and how to live it. In fact I learned that Swift had been reading Montaigne while writing this book and that led me back to that French 16th century philosopher. I found this quotation which summed up the book for me: "Wherever your life ends, it is all there. The advantage of living is not measured by length, but by use; some men have lived long, and lived little; attend to it while you are in it. It lies in you will, not in the number of years, for you to have lived enough."

Using multiple narrators, Swift achieves a kind of carousel effect with the same characters going round and round. We notice a little more detail about each, and learn a little more about them on every go round.The characterizations were excellent, and all (except Vince) remind me of that wonderful line from Dark Side of the Moon, you know..."Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way".My only gripe is that important factors motivating the characters are never fully revealed...What did Amy tell June about her father? What did Ray do with the money?Swift writes with elegance and clearly loves the England he so wonderfully evokes here.

In Swift's hands the dingy ordinariness of his characters' dramas is haunting. The book is full of love, thwarted, misdirected, unspoken, but palpable and heartbreaking.

This story is told in voices, strange at first but increasingly intimate, leaping backward and forward in time, always returning to the journey of four men bound to scatter the ashes of their friend. It is made of the true stuff of real lives, the incidents related seem insubstantial, incabable of sustaining a narative--they do not even seem to make sense at first. Patiently, Swift draws the reader in. The individual characters define themselves and re-live their lives. More and more is revealed--often through overlapping memories of events related from different points of view. Like a mystery, there are clues and false leads. The solutions, artfully withheld until the final pages, are deeply satisfying. Somehow, Swift creates from simple lives--none of the characters is well-educated or particularly accomplished--a complex tableau encompassing great humanity. Somehow Jack Dodd, the dead butcher whose ashes fly upward over the sea in the final scene, claims a piece of all of us. When I finished the last page, I re-read the last sentence aloud to savor the cadences, then sat quietly for a long time.