Last Orders by Graham Swift, Picador, $272.
FOUR friends make a journey from Bermondsey, London, to Margate to scatter the ashes of Jack Dodds over the sea. As they travel slowly towards the coast, they each look back over their lives and the chances they have squandered.
Vic is the undertaker whose funeral parlour was across the road from Jack's butcher's shop. Ray first met Jack during the North African campaign in World War II. Vince was orphaned by one of Hitler's V2 bombs and adopted by Jack and his wife Amy. Lenny is the friend who lost in love.
Each of them is passed the torch that leads towards the last resting place of Jack Dodds. Together their disparate stories form the fabric that is Jack's own story.
Graham Swift deftly links their tales together and the novel is written in the first person throughout. To themselves they speak as they would to each other, with grammatical errors and a dialect that though softened by Swift, is unmistakably Cockney. His command of language is such that the dialect is not forced and never loses its authenticity.
This is a novel about sad lives, men and women who survived a punishing war and emerged into a peace that offered them few choices for the future. Jack wanted to be a doctor, Ray a jockey and Lenny dreamed of glory in the boxing ring.
