Rating: 
Summary: It drew me on and on
Review: This story is told in voices, strange at first but increasingly intimate, leaping backward and forward in time, always returning to the journey of four men bound to scatter the ashes of their friend. It is made of the true stuff of real lives, the incidents related seem insubstantial, incabable of sustaining a narative--they do not even seem to make sense at first. Patiently, Swift draws the reader in. The individual characters define themselves and re-live their lives. More and more is revealed--often through overlapping memories of events related from different points of view. Like a mystery, there are clues and false leads. The solutions, artfully withheld until the final pages, are deeply satisfying. Somehow, Swift creates from simple lives--none of the characters is well-educated or particularly accomplished--a complex tableau encompassing great humanity. Somehow Jack Dodd, the dead butcher whose ashes fly upward over the sea in the final scene, claims a piece of all of us. When I finished the last page, I re-read the last sentence aloud to savor the cadences, then sat quietly for a long time.
Rating:
Summary: Totally engrossing
Review: Using multiple narrators, Swift achieves a kind of carousel effect with the same characters going round and round. We notice a little more detail about each, and learn a little more about them on every go round. The characterizations were excellent, and all (except Vince) remind me of that wonderful line from Dark Side of the Moon, you know..."Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way". My only gripe is that important factors motivating the characters are never fully revealed...What did Amy tell June about her father? What did Ray do with the money? Swift writes with elegance and clearly loves the England he so wonderfully evokes here.
Rating:
Summary: A great book!
Review: When I picked up this book, I thought it was going to be about friendship. It is much more than that. Using the technique of having snippets (some very amusing) from different points of view we learn, bit by bit, brush stroke by brush stroke, more and more about each of the characters. Are they wonderful and exciting? Not really. Are they worth spending time with? Definitely, as they are eminently human. And as we learn more and more, this book becomes increasingly existential in nature. While each of the characters is dealing with Jack's death, it becomes a book about life, and how to live it. In fact I learned that Swift had been reading Montaigne while writing this book and that led me back to that French 16th century philosopher. I found this quotation which summed up the book for me: "Wherever your life ends, it is all there. The advantage of living is not measured by length, but by use; some men have lived long, and lived little; attend to it while you are in it. It lies in you will, not in the number of years, for you to have lived enough."
Rating: 
Summary: Definitely worth reading, but not great
Review: While I expected a much more gripping and emotional tale of old friendships and family ties, this story was generally good. The author jumps forward and backward in time; from character to character; in choppy chapters that left me searching through what I had already read to clarify the story. In spite of this, I found myself swept up in the story and anxious to find out how it progressed and ended. It was very well written and I found the language usage a delight
Rating:
Summary: Swift's most deeply human work to date
Review: While not as complex as the earlier Waterland, Swift's latest novel cuts closer to the bone. Through the voices of a group of men who have been friends since the second World War, Swift weaves a tapestry of personal histories, disclosing the long-held resentments and loves of men who have just watched the first of their number die. As they travel to Margate to carry out their friend's last wish- to have his ages thrown off the end of Margate pier- their angers and griefs come to the fore, exposing lives that have been defined by struggle, but also by extraordinary acts of sacrifice and heroism. Swift is marvelous at manipulating the sympathies of the reader; by the end of the book even the most unpleasant of the men has become irresistably, tragically human. This is a wonderful, sad and gorgeous story of the emotionally complex workings of outwardly simple lives.
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