Last Orders

THIS novel arrives fresh from having won the most prestigious British literary prize, the Booker, and yet it's not as bad as that makes it sound. The soap-opera-ish plot emerges in the background as the jumbled-up thoughts and memories of four men as they drive to Margate pier to throw the ashes of Jack Dodds into the sea.

As he lay dying of stomach cancer, Jack had borrowed e1,000 from his adoptive son, Vince, and given it to his old army buddy Ray to put on a longshot at Goodwood -- for Amy, Jack's wife of fifty years. He might or might not have known that Ray had had an affair with Amy 25 years before. Will the longshot pay off? Will Amy marry Ray? There is plenty of Booker-bait here: Last Orders seeks to capture, in what the judges no doubt took to be an authentic way, a working-class culture from one of the most depressed areas of London. And the drive to Margate has the right degree of humility as a series of events and makes for an example of that modish style I like to call the Ruminative School of fiction (see the novels of Richard Ford, passim). Still, with discrete passages as fine as you could hope for, the book is undeniably affecting. Martin Walker says that Bill Clinton is "the President we deserve," and maybe, in the self-absorbed and complacent 1990s, this is the fiction we deserve.

COPYRIGHT 1997 National Review, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning