Swift, Swiftly

Well, now that there's a container for lingering thoughts about Dirty Pretty Things, it seems we need one for our last novel. I hope you're having a good weekend in advance of (sigh) our last week together. We move on, of course, to our last novel: Graham Swift's Last Orders. Swift was born in South London (where I think he still lives) in 1949, and he has written at least three terrific novels (in addition to a few others): 1983's Waterland, 1992's Ever After, and 1996's Last Orders. John Banville has called Swift "one of England's finest living novelists." Waterland was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and Last Orders, of course, won the Booker Prize. There's also a good movie version of Waterland out there (with Jeremy Irons playing the role of history teacher, Tom Crick). Swift's work often explores the contingencies and instabilities involved in the ways we understand and narrate history. The middle of the twentieth century -- and especially World War II -- tend to loom prominently in his novels. It may be that with Last Orders we'll find ourselves needing to return to our conversation from earlier this semester about post-imperial melancholy and nostalgia. Referring to Waterland and Last Orders, the critic Donald Kaczvinsky has suggested that "Swift's two major novels explore origins and ends, questions of identity, and the textual nature of the self."

Last Orders has been accused (rather unfairly) by some as borrowing too heavily from Faulkner's plot & technique in As I Lay Dying (a novel also about disposing of a friend's remains), which may partially explain the controversy that ensued after the novel won the Booker: for example, V.S. Naipual bitterly remarked that "the Booker is murder ... it is useless. No one knows what a novel is any more -- it is foolish. All novels written now are debris -- new characters in old work."

The frame/plot of this novel is rather simple, but our job will be to figure out where this novel fits relative to our various lines of inquiry this semester. Why does it belong in a course on "Multicultural British Literature"? What kind of England are we looking at here? What thematic currents from our earlier novels does this novel pick up? Does it help us to think about some of our buzzwords like intineraries, maps, London, historical trauma, masculinity, class, space, etc.? Recalling Eureka Street, can we make anything of the fact that there seems to be a mix of comedy and pathos in this novel?

Don't forget to refer to Sara's helpful index of the various characters and related partners/children (posted below), and feel free to weigh in with some comments here about the novel in advance of Monday's discussion.