Last Orders

Jack Dodds and his three buddies, Ray, Vic, and Lenny, have spent a lifetime together in their London neighborhood. They love and hate each other and are safe in their intimate sparring until Jack suddenly dies of cancer and leaves them bereft. One autumn day, the three friends join with Jack's estranged son to toss Jack's ashes into the sea. As the four men drive, they review their collective history and create a memorable quartet about friendship and fate. Graham Swift tells his Booker Prize-winning novel in a fascinating layering of voices, which are wonderfully re-created by this audiobook's seven narrators. Many are stars of the audiobook world, and their skills are in evidence as they disappear into the range of voices and personalities in this wise tale. The only quibble is that the men's voices are similar enough that one doesn't always know which character is speaking. Somehow, though, that doesn't bother. This is a lovely listen. A.C.S. (c) AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine

Starred review from April 1, 1996
On a bleak spring day, four men meet in their favorite pub in a working-class London neighborhood. They are about to begin a pilgrimage to scatter the ashes of a fifth man, Jack Dodds, friend since WWII of three of them, adoptive father to the fourth. By the time they reach the seaside town where Jack's "last orders" have sent them, the tangled relationship among the men, their wives and their children has obliquely been revealed. Swift's lean, suspenseful and ultimately quite moving narrative is propelled by vernacular dialogue and elliptical internal monologues. Through the men's richly differentiated voices, the reader gradually understands the bonds of friendship, loyalty and love, and the undercurrents of greed, adulterous betrayal, parental guilt, anger and resentment that run through their intertwined lives. Each of them, it turns out, has a guilty secret, and the ironies compound as the quiet dramas of their lives are revealed. Amy, Jack's widow, does not accompany the men; she chooses instead to visit her and Jack's profoundly handicapped daughter in an institution, as she has done twice a week for 50 years. Swift plumbs the existentialist questions of identity and the meaning of existence while remaining true to the vocabulary, social circumstances and point of view of his proletarian characters. Written with impeccable honesty and paced with unflagging momentum, the novel ends with a scene of transcendent understanding.