Rating: 
Summary: Modern day working class tales....
Review: seminal tale of four men: lenny, ray, vic and vince, who do a last order for a decease mate, jack dodds, which is to dump his ashes into the sea near margate. along the way, we learn about the kind of man jack was through the four characters and also through his widow, amy.definately a stark portrait of working class england in the late 20th century.swift uses his four characters to explain jack dodds, the way ralph ellison did with rhinehart in the invisible man. the other guys " flesh " jack out, showing the reader the life of a man who did the best he could with the choices he had/ made. all of the characters are great. especially vince, as jack's adopted son and lenny, a man who has a uncanny knack with winning at playing the horses. this is a faulkneresque novel that's actually easier to read. swift repeats certain phrases, words, and sentences over, as if it's all a code, giving the story a cryptic feeling. comparisons of this book to canterbury tales have piqued my curosity; i have never read the tales, so that's another title to add to my ever expanding list. the last chapter is memorable. highly reccomended.
Rating: 
Summary: What might have been
Review: The book gave me no emotional kick but kept me interested as a puzzle of what makes these people tick. I was especially interested in the surprising resentment that Vince held towards Jack, his adoptive father. Amy's resentment to her husband is more understandable albeit tragic. The overriding appeal is how the characters search themselves about "What life might have been if only this not that...". Commonly, they are unable to 'talk' about their feeling that Swift reveals to us as thoughts only; a tragic failure so many readers can identify with. Too often, the conversation between close friends in the book is barbed and sarcastic rather than warm. Their conversation is mundane which mask thoughts that are sometimes spiritual. Our book discussion group liked the work much better after discussing it for a few hours, as often occurs. Reading selected paragraphs aloud revealed humor that escaped me when I was reading to myself.
Rating:
Summary: The Wind Will Take What You Throw Away
Review: The death of a friend brings about a dual state of mentally replaying the role that person had in our life and introspection. Graham Swift makes an amazing novel out of that fact, telling a story, in first person narrative, from no less than six perspectives jumping in temporal chaos. The result is an admittedly confusing patchwork of stories, philosophies, and feelings that when stiched together at the end form a broad and comforting quilt. To be succinct, it is amazingly powerful. Graham weaves his quilt from the lives of six people; three of whom are friends and one the son of a dead man who's dying wish is to have his ashes scattered near Dreamland. Stylistically, the first person narrative is effective partly because it reveals more in what it does not say, than what it specifically does say. The deep depths of the characters are drawn not directly from the words printed, but instead from their disjointed interactions. Forgiveness is offered between characters a hundred pages before the foul is executed. Regret is shown not in a meladramatic death soliliquy, but instead in the choice of a final resting place. Unlike other fiction works, this style requires time to savor and concentrate. To steal an idea from a friend, this is gourmet literature, not fast food. Everyone will take away their own ideas about what this book is really "about" at a deeper level, but I think at its heart this novel is about taking care in choosing which bits of life should be retained and which should be discarded. When we truly dispose of the living and the dead, they are gone forever.
Rating:
Summary: The Wind Will Take What You Throw Away
Review: The death of a friend brings about a dual state of mentally replaying the role that person had in our life and introspection. Graham Swift makes an amazing novel out of that fact, telling a story, in first person narrative, from no less than six perspectives jumping in temporal chaos. The result is an admittedly confusing patchwork of stories, philosophies, and feelings that when stiched together at the end form a broad and comforting quilt. To be succinct, it is amazingly powerful. Graham weaves his quilt from the lives of six people; three of whom are friends and one the son of a dead man who's dying wish is to have his ashes scattered near Dreamland. Stylistically, the first person narrative is effective partly because it reveals more in what it does not say, than what it specifically does say. The deep depths of the characters are drawn not directly from the words printed, but instead from their disjointed interactions. Forgiveness is offered between characters a hundred pages before the foul is executed. Regret is shown not in a meladramatic death soliliquy, but instead in the choice of a final resting place. Unlike other fiction works, this style requires time to savor and concentrate. To steal an idea from a friend, this is gourmet literature, not fast food. Everyone will take away their own ideas about what this book is really "about" at a deeper level, but I think at its heart this novel is about taking care in choosing which bits of life should be retained and which should be discarded. When we truly dispose of the living and the dead, they are gone forever.
Rating:
Summary: Faulkner goes to England
Review: The great flaw of this book is that is so BLATANTLY in style, form and plot, an out-and-out rip-off of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying.-For those of you unfamiliar with the Faulkner novel, briefly: It concerns a family of working class whites carrying a coffin across the wilds of the Southeastern United States. Each short chapter is headed up by one of the character's names (e.g., Vardamen), and the lyrical interior monologue prose for which Faulkner is famous is written in a working class dialect not so easy to decipher sometimes even for a reader raised in South Carolina! - Sound familiar?... I think this book was awarded the Booker Prize as sort of an apology for not giving it to Swift's Waterland...
Nevertheless, the book is good. I guess if you go along with the famous Picasso quote that, "Mediocre artists plagiarize. Great artists steal." then I guess none of the above will bother you. Despite the superficial overtones of mortality and death, the theme is really that recurring Proustian one in Swift's work: The elusiveness of Reality. As Vic meditates (p.216), "You see all the dead, all the bent or broken or plain stretched-out dead, and you think, These people are strangers now, total strangers. But it's the living who are strangers, it's the living whose shapes you can't ever guess." Pretty good stuff. I mean, you could do a lot worse than this book, a whole lot worse...
Rating: 
Summary: Who's on 1st?
Review: The theme of this book intrigued me but I found it very choppy and confusing. The author should have provided a scorecard to make it easier to sort out the characters. It was just too much work
Rating: 
Summary: A touching, tender novel about friendship and loss
Review: There's a very authentic feel to the individual voices of Swift's characters in Last Orders that gives this novel its charm. The British common man accents jump off the page. These are real people, nothing fake about them. All of them simple people, really, but at the same time their is an emotional complexity to each of them that makes them very human. I really liked the way Swift switches narrative voices every couple of pages. It gave the book variety, a strong pace, and added depth to the story. My only complaint is that there were passages where I felt a little more background about the secondary characters in the novel - women, all of them - would have been appropriate. It took a while to put all the pieces together to figure out just who they were and how they related to the main characters. I think I would have better appreciated their purpose in the story if their characters had been given more depth. All in all, this is a charming novel about friendship, about the bonds between men, and about grieving. It's impressive that Swift was able to infuse so much tenderness into a novel with no female main characters.
Rating:
Summary: A touching, tender novel about friendship and loss
Review: There's a very authentic feel to the individual voices of Swift's characters in Last Orders that gives this novel its charm. The British common man accents jump off the page. These are real people, nothing fake about them. All of them simple people, really, but at the same time their is an emotional complexity to each of them that makes them very human. I really liked the way Swift switches narrative voices every couple of pages. It gave the book variety, a strong pace, and added depth to the story. My only complaint is that there were passages where I felt a little more background about the secondary characters in the novel - women, all of them - would have been appropriate. It took a while to put all the pieces together to figure out just who they were and how they related to the main characters. I think I would have better appreciated their purpose in the story if their characters had been given more depth. All in all, this is a charming novel about friendship, about the bonds between men, and about grieving. It's impressive that Swift was able to infuse so much tenderness into a novel with no female main characters.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting, yet ultimately disappointing
Review: This is an original and perceptive novel, yet somehow I feel that something is lacking. There isn't enough animation amongst characters and some of their thoughts and actions are inexplicable (I was bemused by the fight scene). There is much food for thought in this book, but I couldn't help feeling a little let down at the end. Still, an interesting read nonetheless.
Rating:
Summary: Not Booker Prize material
Review: This novel has an interesting structure, but it takes so long to get the cast of characters straight that I kept losing my concentration. Determined to find out why the Booker prize was awarded, I ploughed through. The novel does come together in the end, but I would not have finished the book had it not been awarded the Booker Prize.
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