Last Orders
by Graham Swift
Summary
Four men meet in a Bermondsey pub on an April morning in 1990 and drive to Margate with a plastic jar. Jack Dodds, butcher, has died, and his last request was that his ashes go into the sea off the end of the pier.
The four are Ray, an insurance clerk and a gifted gambler, Vic the undertaker, Lenny the fruit and vegetable man, and Vince, Jack's adopted son, who sells second hand cars and has brought a Mercedes for the trip. Jack's widow Amy has declined to come, and is instead making her twice weekly bus journey to visit the daughter she and Jack have never acknowledged.
The novel is told in short chapters in each of their voices, including Jack's and Amy's, moving constantly between the car and fifty years of shared history: the war, a butcher's shop that was never wanted, a decision about a disabled child, and the long quiet affair one of them had with Amy.
It is a book about ordinary men who have no vocabulary for any of this, told in exactly the language they do have. Swift never patronises them, and the accumulation of small withheld things is what makes the last twenty pages land as hard as they do.
Suited to readers who like Alan Bennett or the quieter English novels of the postwar period, and a very good audiobook given how much of it is voice. The rotating narrators take a few chapters to separate; the chapter headings tell you who is speaking, so use them.
Historical Context & Significance
Last Orders won the Booker Prize in 1996, Graham Swift's sixth novel and his second appearance on the shortlist after Waterland in 1983.
The win was followed by an argument about influence. Australian critics pointed out the resemblance to William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, another novel in which a family carries a body to burial in short chapters told by rotating narrators. Swift acknowledged the debt readily and said he had never concealed it, and most commentators concluded that homage rather than plagiarism was the right word, but the story ran for weeks.
Fred Schepisi filmed it in 2001 with Michael Caine, Bob Hoskins, Tom Courtenay and Helen Mirren, an unusually strong cast that has kept the novel in circulation with readers who might never otherwise have picked up a Booker winner.