WHEN London butcher Jack Dodds dies three of his old pals, in the company of his abrasive adopted son Vince, set off to satisfy his bizarre final wish; the scattering of Jack's ashes off Margate pier. The request is fulfilled, in some style driving down the Kent coast in Vince's flashy dark blue Mercedes car. It is a tension packed day trip turned odyssey which even includes having the dead man's ashes passed around like a relay baton among the mourners as they explore Canterbury Cathedral.
One of the group, Ray, comments as he stands inside the mighty church contemplating its history: "We must look a strange bunch. Me and Vic aren't much the worst for wear but Vince is all scuffed and mud stained. He puts on his coat, which hides most of it except the bottoms of his trousers, where it's worst. Lenny looks like he's been pulled through a hedge. He's hobbling slightly but he's trying not to show it. It's like we aren't the same people who left Bermondsey this morning, four blokes on a special delivery. It's like somewhere along the line we just became travellers."
Graham Swift's fifth novel Last Orders (Picador, £15.99 in UK), is not only a triumph for contemporary British fiction, it is a triumph for the hypnotic power of vernacular speech in its ability to create honest, lasting art out of life itself. Swift's inspired use of natural speech rhythms throughout this novel is remarkable and virtually flawless. The complex simplicity of the narrative is brilliantly sustained through an ongoing series of individual monologues spoken by Ray, the central narrator, with contributions from his old buddies Vie and Lenny, as well as some comments from Amy, Jack's widow, and angry Vince, the reluctant adopted son who became a motor dealer in order to avoid working in Dodds's family butcher shop.
All of the characters speak the same language, an authentic working class south east London English resounding with a harsh realist poetry all its own. Swift succeeds in giving each of them their own distinct voice, creating character by an unusually subtle handling of tone.
Writers are expected to live inside their characters' minds; Swift has given these sad, angry and human individuals voices and, lives so compellingly convincing that the reader comes to know them with a depth of intimacy fiction seldom achieves.
United by the same event, Jack's demise, the three older men find themselves mulling over their respective relationships with Dodds. His death is also a cue for looking at their own lives; their war experiences, their marriages, their secrets, their memories. Vie, the most reticent character, is an undertaker in his family firm and has worked across the street from Jack's butcher shop all his working life.
Various memories of Jack Dodds filter through his mind, such as the hot summer's day he was short staffed: "I had two in storage and one of them needed seeing to badly. So I thought of Jack across the road. I thought, maybe a butcher. I said, `Jack can you do me a favour?' I had to steer him round to the back of the shop, out of earshot of a customer to explain. He looked at me then he said, `No problem, Vic,' as if I had asked him if he could help me shift a piece of furniture But he didn't turn a hair, didn't bat an eyelid, as if a seventy four year old woman who'd died crossing the road wasn't any different from a joint of beef. I said, `Thank you, Jack. It's not everyone'. He said `Any time, Vie. I ain't everyone.' And when the eldest son came to view I thought, `You'll never know your mum was tidied Lip by the butcher across the road'."
Jack emerges as a jolly, big hearted, somewhat overpowering man whose refusal to acknowledge his mentally handicapped daughter undermines his relationship with his wife Amy. She is a strong woman, quietly bewildered by the course her life has taken. Nothing interferes with her weekly ritual, the lonely visits to her institutionalised child, now herself a woman in her fifties.
Most of the story is told by Ray. "Lucky Ray", a small man with a flair for picking winners on the track, whose own life is a litany of lost opportunities. His personal pain is balanced by his objective reporting of the past and the present. Central to the perspective that each of the contributing voices makes to the narrative is Jack's rejection of his own child and his acceptance of Vince, taken in as a baby by Amy when his family was killed during the Blitz; Lenny also recalls the Dodds's almost suffocating interest in his daughter.
War, death and the past have always been constant themes in Swift's work, which has invariably explored the mess and chaos of life. Also ever present in his questioning fiction has been his relentless, first person narrative voice.
Shuttlecock (1981) his second novel, begins: "Today I remembered my hamster: my pet hamster, Sammy, a gift for my 10th birthday. It is over 20 years since my 10th birthday, since my hamster came to live in our house, but today I remembered it as if it still existed."
Following his debut The Sweet Shop Owner (1981), Learning To Swim, an assured collection of stories, and Shuttlecock, Swift consolidated his reputation with Waterland in 1983. A strong contender for that year's Booker Prize, it lost to J. M. Coetzee's Life and Times Michael K, yet Waterland set in the curiously mongrel Norfolk Fens - was recognised as one of Britain's finest post war novels. In it Swift unravelled a strange, highly complicated story of a family and of Britain itself. He also pursued his interest in historical accidentalism, which continued in the disappointing Out of This World (1988) - the only time Swift's feel for spoken language has failed - and in the seriously under rated Ever After (1992).
There may well be more ambitious, more intellectual novels published this year, but it is unlikely that any will surpass the heartrending beauty and humanity of Swift's simple story, which belies its awesome technical control. Waterland remains a superb novel, but Graham Swift has with Last Orders and his warm, knowing, unsentimental characters certainly shaken off its ghost.
