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Saying Good-bye: Graham Swift's Last Orders

© Pamela St. Clair

In an interview on the website book page, Graham Swift suggests that "real optimism only comes when you've looked at the darkness." He's speaking about his novel Ever After, but this philosophy is also manifest in his Booker prize winning novel Last Orders.

Four friends meet, as they have been doing for years, at a local east London pub. We are told from the beginning, however, that "[i]t aint like your regular sort of day." Indeed, today the four friends are on a mission, to fulfill the final wish of their friend Jack Dodds, who has requested to have his ashes scattered at the seashore in Margate, a summer tourist place once meaningful to Jack for a number of reasons. Over the years, Margate has lost its luster. And as the four friends privately reminisce, each takes stock of his life, which, like Margate, has dulled and tarnished over the past forty or fifty years.

The friends who journey together to Margate include "Lucky" Ray, Jack's closest friend; Jack's adopted and seemingly ungrateful son Vince; Vic, the local undertaker, who stitched up bodies across the street from Jack's butcher shop; and Lenny, a local grocer. Although Ray speaks the most, chapters alternate among the four friends' voices, as rivalries and loyalties charge the atmosphere during the drive to Margate. Jack's wife Amy and his daughter-in-law, Vince's wife Mandy, do not accompany the men, but their voices contribute to the narrative as well. And as they overlap to reveal relationships with Jack and with one another, the narrative voices weave a sad and lovely braid of longing, of unfulfilled wishes, and of the self-awareness a death usually extracts from us, as we measure the life we lived against the one we might have lived. Toward the end, Jack's voice joins the fray, too. He recalls the advice he received when starting out in the butcher business: "You got to keep a constant eye on the wastage, constant. What you've got to understand is the nature of the goods. Which is perishable." In other words, life is short, so be careful of what you choose to keep and what you choose to throw away.

Even though the narrative takes place during the one-day journey from the pub to Margate, the narrative voices fill in gaps spanning back over fifty years. Individual sorrows and loss reflect personal decisions framed and sometimes determined by the working class London culture. And since the narrators share this culture and the east London vernacular, individual voices are difficult to distinguish at first. But as their separate stories unfold against the backdrop of their shared histories, the voices become as distinctive as the secrets they harbor.

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