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: 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.
| 
