Confessions of a Guilty Freelancer

Graham Swift: Last Orders

The title of the English writer Graham Swift’s new novel, his sixth, Last Orders, echoes moodily down a number of different dark paths. It has three meanings, at least. The first is the novel’s inert, diseased protagonist’s (butcher Jack Arthur Dodds, whose cremated remains are delivered on the novel’s first page and disposed of on the last) last death-bed request, his final orders, to hurl his ashes into the sea; the second is the military meaning, insofar as the three contemporary friends (Ray, Vic and Lenny) who accompany Jack’s adopted son on the funeral trip, are duty-bound, given that they are all veterans, like Jack, of World War II; and, third, the humblest meaning, the pub call of “last orders” that the proprietor of the men’s haunt (“They calls it the Coach and Horses but it ain’t never gone nowhere”), has used so often over the years, bidding the men to have just one more of the same all around. And Graham Swift, in a number of ways, is having his own just one more of the same, since Last Orders is replete with familiar Swiftian (small s) fictional elements, both in form and content. There are the recurring variations on foundlings, defective children, entwined histories, mature narrators, death as a structural device, that fill his five earlier novels. Graham Swift: Last Orders 296 297 Swift is best known in this country because of the great success of Waterland, his third (1984) novel, but the first one to be published over here. Swift found a happy blend of setting and situation in Waterland , and his didactic tendencies seemed appropriate (and desirable) given the voice of the history teacher/narrator. Swift had had some goodsuccessinEnglandbefore Waterlandwithhisfirsttwonovels,The Sweet-Shop OwnerandShuttlecock,butnotenoughtolureanAmerican publisher. Waterland was short-listed in England for the Booker Prize when it appeared in 1983 and it won the Guardian Prize for the best English novel. That was enough to soften up our own literary-public-relations complex; Waterland reached a larger-than-expected American audience , and was made into a film, starring Jeremy Irons, now available on home video cassette. In critical circles, Waterland is used as a benchmark. Though it was Swift’s third novel, he was viewed in the U.S. as an instant success, since Waterland was the only novel at hand. (The earlier two and a short-story collection, Learning to Swim, though, were quickly enough brought out in America.) But the two novels that have followed Waterland –Out of This World (1988) and Ever After (1992)–received a mixed reception, and neither ever achieved the popularity of Waterland. That novel still casts its long shadow over all subsequent critical comment. Remove Waterland from the mix, and it is likely that American audiences might not be reading Swift’s intelligent and affecting novels at all, though, by force of his output (perhaps he will become the BritishversionofJoyceCarolOates ,havingturnedoutsixnovelsintwelve years),Americanpublishersmighthavefinallydeignedtopublishhim. Similar career paths have occurred in America. There are many examples. Here are two: Robert Olen Butler, the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain. His many 298 previously published novels had left him sufficiently obscure until the collection of short stories won that prize (the equivalent of the Booker andtheGuardiancombined)–so,too,thecareerofWilliamKennedy, who was laureled late. The paradox I am getting to is not that all writers need to write one “breakthrough” book, but that such a book allows readers access not only to the well-known book, but, also, to other books, never, until then, available for a larger readership. Last Orders may be far enough away from Waterland not to gather Swift many new readers, and that would be a shame. He deserves new readers. Though Swift’s recurrent themes and elements are present throughout Last Orders, what is also present, in greater measure, is the quality of affection for all the characters. A Faithful Son No son has been a more faithful chronicler of his father’s generation, eveniftherearenofictionalportraitsofhisownfather(orhisownself. Swift seems to have an aversion to confessional autobiographical writing . In that way, his role in contemporary English literature seems to be that of an antidote to Martin Amis, his autobiographically inclined andenhancedcontemporarywhoalsosportsafamouslastname–and, in Amis’s case, bloodline–of British literature.) The old men of Last Orders (for an American audience) are an invigorating mix of the familiar and the strange...