Finished Last Orders, the story of four ageing cockney geezers taking their friend Jack's ashes to Margate to be scattered and ruminating on life, war and misery along the way. Based loosely on Faulkner's far more satisfying As I Lay Dying it deals with mortality, truth and lies and the secrets which lie in every heart.
I found it pretty good. I feel the novel took a while to get going and for a while Swift's attempts to reproduce the voices of embittered, sozzled, working-class Bermondsey men is an act of ventriloquism rather than of characterisation and at the beginning, I can see his lips moving.
That said, the novel does have strength, although whether the convoluted time-structure was needed to tell what is essentially a simple story is unclear. Like many very male books it comes to life when the women finally get their chance to speak. Amy's sections are illuminating and tender and one feels that for all the talk about Jack it is Amy's tale, and maybe June's. One thinks of the way that Molly Bloom's monologue sets light to all that has come before in Ulysses or how Addie Bundren, speaking from her coffin in As I Lay Dying, opens up can after can of tender, heartbreaking worms.
I have now received and begun Chatterton, which so far is rather mannered and baroque but I like a good literary puzzler so shall persist.
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