Adrian Poole
LAST ORDERS by Graham Swift (Picador, R79,95)
‘IT ain’t like your regular sort of day.” Not quite the opening line you expect from a Graham Swift novel, to date. But this new one, his sixth and this year’s winner of the Booker Prize, ain’t like your regular novel, Swift’s or anyone else’s.
Not that the title, Last Orders, comes as a surprise. You wouldn’t expect such a master of the terminal to opt for anything as upbeat as Opening Time. His first novel ends with a dying widower waiting for his estranged daughter (The Sweet Shop Owner, 1980). His fifth concludes with another widower whose attempt to take his own life has recently failed (Ever After, 1992). You can understand a publisher choosing not to issue a new Graham Swift just in time for Christmas.
There is plenty of Swift’s regular matter in Last Orders, that old-fashioned thing ”the family”, its griefs and scars and vacancies. There is bereavement, remorse and guilt. Bombs and orphans. War in north Africa and on the North Sea. Photographs. A clock. A moron in a mental home. Some gallows humour. Plenty of full stops. Children are orphaned, adopted, abandoned, fugitive. Men are abashed at their own lack of manhood and envious of others. And women? Quite a lot of question marks, too.
Last Orders reworks much of this matter in ingenious ways. Jack Dodds wants his ashes scattered off Margate pier, for instance, and we follow the route taken by four mourners, all men, from the Coach and Horses in Bermondsey. Seventeen of the novel’s 75 sections are headed with place names that flash up like road signs, or the stations of a more sacred progress. Old Kent Road. New Cross. Blackheath. Dartford. And so on. Behind this journey there are secret histories and motives which it would spoil the fun to reveal.
There are two main features of Last Orders which mark this as a new venture for Swift. There is the social topography for a start, the jobs, the pubs, the jokes, the memories, a ”south London” not like anything he has done before. The Bermondsey of Last Orders is a wonderfully dense little world, an extended family home made up of the things its inhabitants remember or cannot forget, from a mundane object like a clock above the bar to a wartime visit to a whorehouse in Cairo.
Not all the memories are equally shared or confided. The reader has to listen carefully for the sound of pieces falling together. Swift is good at this sort of suspense: Shuttlecock (1981) is, in its way, a small masterpiece. Yet the only place in his fiction where you could find anything comparable to the tribal milieu of Last Orders, would be in the fens of Waterland (1983), that extraordinary compaction of historical, geological, social and economic elements on which the mere personal stories of Tom, Dick, Harry and Mary seem to float.
But Waterland also had a here-and-now Greenwich, from which the ageing Tom Crick looked back with longing and remorse. The new thing about Last Orders is that, for the first time, Swift provides no escape from the old home, no eminence supported by class or money or education, however precarious or equivocal. Neither for his main characters nor, overtly at least, for his reader.
The other distinctive feature is that Swift has found new freedoms for the spoken voice. Spare a thought for the translators standing by to turn this into the ”more than 20 languages” boasted by the dust jacket. This will be a bleeding sight more trouble than the others. Not that the shortest section should be a problem, consisting as it does of the mere exclamation – entirely dramatic in context – ”Old buggers”. I imagine this passes easily enough into more than 20 languages.
But there are colloquial rhythms and rhymes that will fox and elude. The wry little pleasures his characters take in speaking or thinking of ”beef and grief”, ”pork and talk”, ”Neville the devil”, ”Gunner Tate, middleweight. Always pissed, always late”. Or the poetry hidden in the name (and nature) of Ray, the novel’s leading character, which quietly erupts, just once, with exquisite timing.
So much of Swift’s previous writing has seemed so, well, written. What a relief to find here such sprightly dialogue, clipped and laconic and humorous. It grows from a real sense of these characters knowing each other, and growing old together. The internal monologues, too, sound less irretrievably split off from the realm of live speech than in the previous novels.
That severance had come to seem Swift’s favoured formal position: the guiltily brooding, ageing male, endlessly confessing his solitary need to be loved, the impossibility of speaking out and being heard, though once upon a time … How refreshing at last to find him opening a new bag of tricks.
The telling of Last Orders is shared by no less than seven voices, five male and two female, six alive and one dead. The most prominent belongs to little Ray Johnson, insurance clerk, gambler and jockey manqu. The next most frequently heard is that of Vince the motor-dealer. You could say that these two share the role of the fraught male figure on whom Swift’s novels have always been centred, the failed son who is even more of a failing father.
Jack’s widow Amy is given a large chance to be heard. This is particularly welcome, given that Amy’s is the role of the desirable wife-and-mother around whom the men all revolve. In Swift’s other novels this figure has seemed intractably paralysed.
In Ever After, the narrator imagining his remote Victorian kinsman reflects: ”I give to Matthew’s life that very quality of benign design that he had already glimpsed might be lacking from the universe.” Like all good novelists, Swift at once yearns for benign design and mistrusts it. For Last Orders he has invented an ingenious design that seems, for once, to make itself happen. This is a rare kind of craft.