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Considered one of Swift's most important novels, the personal histories of Dobbs and his fellow travellers are gradually uncovered in the course of their journey from London to the coast. There is little of the strange magic that makes Swift's novel Waterland so remarkable, with its wonderful atmospherics and frequently lurid tales of eels, incest and ale. Without a touch of patronisation, they sink into their characters and never attempt to steal scenes from each other. These men are at the end of their working lives, and Jack’s death has forced them to think about their own mortality.
He realizes that his feelings about this situation motivated his refusal to follow in his father’s professional footsteps.The action moves constantly between present and past, which isn't a bad narrative scheme, but when it's done so frequently and deliberately, we feel as if we're looking over Schepisi's shoulder as he diagrams the whole story for us. Similarly, I don’t think I’ve ever lost touch with the enchantment of reading those first stories, long before I’d written any myself or even knew how to. Ray explains to Lenny that Jack’s wife, Amy, who isn’t present, wants Ray to scatter Jack’s ashes into the sea at Margate, in accordance with Jack’s final wishes. Their pilgrimage, underlined by a brief stop in Canterbury, ends with them casting their friend’s ashes to the turbulent April winds. J'étais persuadée en voyant l'aperçu avant l'achat qu'il s'agissait de la version poche ou en tout cas d'un plus petit format.
Amy has paid her dues to both Jack and June, not that she puts it like that, and Ray reminds us how he had wanted her since before he met her. Martin Amis, London Fields; Geoffrey Chaucer, The Cantebury Tales; Roddy Doyle, The Woman Who Walked Into Doors; William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying; Graham Greene, The End of the Affair; James Joyce, Ulysses; James Kelman, How Late It Was, How Late; Milan Kundera, Immortality; David Lodge, Nice Work; Patrick McCabe, The Butcher Boy; Tim O’Brien, In the Lake of the Woods; Mona Simpson, The Lost Father; Evelyn Waugh, The Loved One; Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room. Locations included the London areas of Peckham and Bermondsey, Eastbourne, Canterbury, Chatham, Margate, and Rochester. Vince himself was happy to put up with the ineradicable smell of meat in the back, despite Jack’s best efforts to clean it, for the sake of time with Sally. Lenny's daughter Sally had a relationship with Vince Dodds, and became pregnant, before marrying a jailbird.
I admire Faulkner very much, and there are obvious similarities between the narrative – although I have my jar of ashes, Faulkner has his rotting corpse, and the setting is clearly very different.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. It’s a strikingly simple story where little happens, but where we warm to the frailty and vulnerability of these flawed, human characters as we learn more about them.
He’s permanently disconnected, making up for it with spiv-like swagger—Swift dares us not to take seriously this incarnation of the stereotypical used-car salesman, complete with camel-hair coat—and his suggestive remarks to any young woman he meets. This experience is making everybody ask the big questions, however they might be moderated by blokeish asides. Little details from a hundred and more pages back, sometimes right from the beginning of the novel, come together in a single moment that explains whole lifetimes of disappointment and regret.
As with Jack’s unfulfilled army promise—Ray had been impressed by his ability to step up in a crisis—and Lenny’s sad failure after the war. Why does Vince, against the wishes of the others, scatter some of the ashes over the hill at Wick’s Farm? Each of them, it turns out, has a guilty secret, and the ironies compound as the quiet dramas of their lives are revealed. Really, it’s an uncared-for working space as worn-out and crumbling as any backstreet in Bermondsey, and with metalwork suffering the kind of rust only the sea can inflict. Without revealing too much, the character of June is the real heart of the novel, even if she is given a relatively small amount of page-time.Lenny has never forgiven Vince for his treachery concerning his son-in-law and the stolen car, but it comes out as outrage that Vince is daring, with no agreement from the others, to attempt to take the lid off the jar holding Jack’s ashes. Four men once close to Jack Dodds, a London butcher, meet to carry out his peculiar last wish: to have his ashes scattered into the sea at Margate. One or other of Jack’s friends—they all knew him in different ways, not that this means any of them were best mates—is pretty sure Jack didn’t have enough money for his retirement project. Nothing could more embody this than the seaside pier – a flimsy-looking structure dedicated to fun and frivolity, deliberately constructed over the crashing waves.
- Fruugo ID: 258392218-563234582
- EAN: 764486781913
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