Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts from the ‘Graham Swift’ category

Reading Writer – Swift's Last Orders

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Let’s go back to Graham Swift. I’ve been thinking some more about Last Orders. I talked about the story when I wrote up my first post, but I want to spend some time looking at the jumble of voice and structure and detail that transformed this particular story into such a wonderfully-written book.

 

What strikes me only a few lines into the very first paragraph is the particular emotional structure of Ray’s voice. His edgy melancholy and gruff sadness. He is a sappy stoic. Ray is set up right away as our guide to the novel. He opens THE story and signals that this story will also be HIS story. There are a lot of characters introduced across the next few pages and sly allusions to almost every single subplot which means the novel threatens to become confusing. But it stays firmly in Ray’s perspective for 18 pages, long enough for the reader to feel steadied again, before switching to Amy.

 

Amy’s voice is the “chin-up, old girl” variety – a perfect blend of bitter self-pity and desperate pluckiness. She is so angry but she’s trying not to let that anger win. One of the novel’s strengths is its willingness to keep us in suspense as to why. And we’re also meant to wonder about June, the person to whom Amy is talking.

 

Eventually, although Ray remains the most frequent POV, each of the men gets a turn leading the narrative – Vince, Lenny, Vic. And Amy shows up a few more times. The effect created is very much like a gathering in a noisy neighborhood pub. Someone starts reminiscing and everyone adds the detail most important to them. The stories intersect but also swiftly diverge. Details start to get cluttered or vague. The voices of the novel’s seven narrators are similar because they all come from the same place and have lived similar lives, a feature of the novel that frustrated me at first, but as I read further, I think Swift manages to differentiate them where it matters – their judgments of others, their interior decisions.

 

Besides Ray, I found myself really drawn to Vic. He speaks directly to the reader only seven times and each time with this kind of fierce pride and solemnity about him. He is the only man in the group who seems to be at peace with himself and his life. Although he’s just a little pompous too. He can’t help feeling the power his job gives him, although he tries to be respectful of it for the most part. I suppose I liked the contradiction in that. A character that recognizes the authority he has over people at their weakest moments and who tries to honor that but who can’t help feeling just a bit superior. That seems very human to me.

 

Part and parcel of the constantly shifting point-of-view in the novel is the way each man describes the others, and his friendship in relation to each and then to all. It was interesting to compare how Vic thought others saw him with the glimpses Swift gives the reader of how they actually did. Same for Ray and Vince and Lenny. Human relationships are so complicated, with so much room for misunderstanding and false impression. The men in Last Orders have known each other for something like forty years and Swift does an excellent job of using a particular blend of their voices to bring all that baggage, both good and bad, into the present moment of their car ride to Margate.

 

This is a novel I could write pages and pages about. And after my first post, so many of you mentioned his other novel Waterlands, which I now have waiting for me on the shelf, along with Shuttlecock, so I’m really looking forward to both.

 

 

Graham Swift – Last Orders

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I can no longer remember who recommended Graham Swift’s Last Orders. It may have been Stephen…is that right? But in any case, whoever suggested this wonderful book deserves a huge thank you. What a gem. What a treat to read.

 

I love complicated books with multiple points-of-view and an intricate timeline. Books which are hard to put down because of a real risk of losing the thread. The main, forward action of Last Orders takes place in a single day but the story jumps around from person to person, covering a lifetime of short scenes and powerful experiences. A hodge-podge collection of the moments which gave meaning to each character’s life and which led them all to this particular day.

 

The day in question is not an easy one. Jack Dodds has recently passed away and a group of his friends – Ray, Lenny and Vic – along with his son Vince are on a road trip from London to scatter his ashes on the sea. Swift takes a single car journey and transforms it into the ride of a lifetime. Heartbreak, friendship, treachery, sorrow, luck and joy and everything else you can imagine a person’s life can contain all hitchhike along with the four men as they carry out Jack’s last request.

 

Behind Jack’s story is another, more subtle one. The loud, bravado-filled presence of the four men in the car is made conspicuous by the absence of the women who should be with them – Ray’s wife and daughter, Lenny’s daughter, Jack’s wife and daughter, Vince’s daughter. These are men who have suffered heavy losses. Their sorrow at losing Jack is really the tip of the iceberg, an accumulation of losing much more across a lifetime.

 

Ray has a more central role in the novel and his story is one of the more compelling narratives. His life was intertwined with Jack’s to an incredible degree, for both better and worse. Witnessing the arc of his grief as the four men journey toward the seashore is a wonderfully complicated and riveting experience. I think Swift really gets at the heart of what makes grieving such a horrible process – if it were a simple feeling we would know how to deal with it. But grief surges forth out of the messiness of our day to day and the convoluted details of our relationships. It will never be simple or easy.

 

There is so much going on in this novel – differences between the four men, fathers and daughters, love lost and love found, abandonment, and even a look at social class. Not to mention Swift’s structural and narrative choices. I think Last Orders is a great candidate for a Reading Writer post, because from a writing technique perspective there is a lot to look at and examine. I’ll have to save that for another day.

 

This was my first experience reading Graham Swift and it goes without saying that I really enjoyed it. Has anyone else read anything else by him – any suggestions? I just went and bookmooched his second novel Shuttlecock and his third novel Waterland so will be looking forward to those.