Reading guide: Last Orders by Graham Swift
Four men reflect on their pasts as they say a final goodbye to their close friend
Where to start with Graham Swift: a guide to his best books
Graham Swift’s work is praised for its simple but powerful portrayal of English life. He won the Booker Prize in 1996 with Last Orders and has been nominated two other times – but which of his many books should you read first?
Author photo © GL Portrait / Alamy
Graham Swift insists that the origin of his fiction is a mystery and told me in an interview 10 years ago that a collection of stories had come to him ‘inexplicably’. He goes to his writing desk each morning ‘to see if anything happens’, revealing: ‘I can describe this process, but I can’t explain it.’ And yet, whether he intends them to be or not, the books that have sprung from his process over the past half a century chronicle the changing texture of English life.
Swift won the Booker Prize in 1996 for Last Orders, which was adapted into a film starring Michael Caine, after emerging as part of the generation of English writers that included fellow winners Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro and Ian McEwan. Swift’s early works are driven by verbal energy, while his recent fiction favours a more economical style that leaves space for the reader to interpret ambiguous events for themselves. He told me that he believes writing is about ‘harnessing that inexplicable something behind words which gives simple sentences enormous power’.
His characters, such as Tom Crick in Waterland, Jack Dodds in Last Orders and Jane Fairchild in Mothering Sunday, exist vividly in the mind of his reader. We can picture them clearly – which might be one reason why they have proved popular with filmmakers for adaptation – and Swift likes to think of his characters living on after he has finished writing about them.
Swift is now 76, yet the past decade or so has been productive – since 2014, he has published two collections of stories and two novels. We should be able to look forward to more books, and readers who are interested in the way that Swift creates fiction should read his insightful collection of essays, Making an Elephant: Writing from Within (2009), but here’s a guide to some of the high points of his fiction so far.
Graham Swift
© Leonardo Cendamo/Getty ImagesThe one about the end of a life that launched a career – The Sweet Shop Owner (1980)
Swift grew up in south London – and continues to live there – and it has provided the setting for several of his books, including his first novel, which unfolds on the last day of the eponymous sweet shop owner’s life.
Willy Chapman’s monologue is addressed to his estranged daughter (Swift also used this vocative mode of narration in his 2007 novel Tomorrow, in which a mother addresses her sleeping children). It tells his story and, in particular, that of his troubled marriage, with amusing interruptions from his shop assistants.
As it moves towards its affecting conclusion, a portrait of a whole life – and, from the vantage point of 2026, a vision of how bustling British high streets used to be – takes shape in this short novel which, while its protagonist reaches his end, marks a bright beginning for its author.
The one that reached new heights of sophistication – Shuttlecock (1981)
Swift’s second novel came hot on the heels of his first but, with its layered narratives, it was a significant leap forward. For the first time, Swift explores more than one historical setting, with the story of Prentis, who works in the dead crimes department of the London police archives, interspersed with documents purportedly concerning his father’s time in occupied France during the Second World War.
It is a skilful work which poses questions about the nature of storytelling, deception and the ways individuals reckon with the past – a recurring theme for Swift, who wrote in a 2008 essay: ‘Handling the past is one of fiction’s principal, perennial functions.’
The one that changed everything – Waterland (1983)
Swift’s third novel brought him a wide readership and was, he has said, ‘a watershed’ in his career, in part because it earned him enough money to dedicate himself to writing fiction full-time. It is set in the Fens of East Anglia and is the longest and arguably most ambitious of his novels – Swift’s confidence and belief in the story he is writing is palpable from its first page to its 500th. Even when he takes time out from the story of the teacher narrator Tom Crick, who is addressing his teenaged history students, for extended digressions, it never flags.
Crick is looking back from the late-1970s to the summer of 1942 – in particular the night when the body of a boy was washed up in the river on which Tom grew up. But this doesn’t begin to cover the range of this book. Into these pages flow centuries of history, beer, eels. The novel should come with a health warning for anybody who is creeped out by these slippery creatures, although Swift, in a famous chapter, makes them compelling to even the squeamish. It was the first time he came to the notice of Booker Prize judges, making the shortlist, but losing out to J.M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K.
The one that won the Booker Prize, then caused controversy – Last Orders (1996)
Thirty years ago, Swift won the Booker Prize for his sixth novel, which tells the story of a group of south London men who are taking the ashes of their old friend – Jack Dodds, a Bermondsey butcher – to Margate, to be scattered into the sea. An ex-boxer, a funeral director and a former insurance clerk are among those who take turns to tell their stories in this novel of multiple narrators. The men, and their wives, are of a generation whose lives were shaped by the Second World War and, when we meet them, they are growing old in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain of the 1980s.
Swift’s multi-narrator technique would have been familiar to anyone who has read William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, which is about a family transporting a dead woman’s remains in the American South. After winning the Booker, Swift was accused, by academic John Frow, of ‘substantial borrowing’ from Faulkner’s novel. One of the judges, A.N. Wilson, said he regretted the decision to award the prize to Last Orders. It must be said, however, that Faulkner’s book is widely read and Swift’s allusions to it are instantly recognisable, so his admission, in an interview with Salon, that ‘there is a little homage at work’, sounds reasonable.
The one that’s strange and suspenseful – The Light of Day (2003)
Six years after winning the Booker Prize, Swift’s next novel, which is narrated by a former policeman turned private detective, George Webb, was on the longlist.
Set in south-west London, this slow-burner tells of how George has fallen in love with Sarah, who is in prison for murdering her husband. It is subtle, suspenseful and another feat of ventriloquism, in which Swift brings an ordinary man’s idiolect to the page, while patiently ratcheting up the tension as the story of the murder, and the narrator’s role in it, is revealed.
The one that tackles rural England in the 21st century – Wish You Were Here (2011)
Although it had admirers, Swift’s novel of rural England in the mid-2000s was not universally praised, but a decade and a half after publication it might be viewed as a deft snapshot of pre-Brexit Britain. Jack Luxton is driving the body of his late brother, Tom, who was killed serving in the British Army in Iraq, back to their native Devon. During the journey, Jack reveals the history of their farming family, which was badly affected by the BSE and foot and mouth crises, and muses on his relationship with his brother.
Swift shows the English countryside undergoing transition, with centuries-old ways of life being replaced by tourism. It is not an unfamiliar story but, because Swift inhabits his characters – both locals and incomers – as convincing individuals, he gets at the complexities of a subject matter that too often lends itself to caricature.
The one that shows he excels at the short form – England and Other Stories (2014)
In this 2014 collection, Swift proves to be a master of the short form and as attuned as ever to the currents coursing through contemporary England. The title story finds a touring stand-up comedian lost and sleeping in his car on a Devon moor. Elsewhere, we encounter a window-cleaning entrepreneur (‘Going Up in the World’), and a father overwhelmed with grief for his soldier son (‘Fusilli’).
There are stories here that you will read in half an hour but contemplate for years, almost as if you had experienced the events described. Time and again, Swift shows that the everyday is full of profundity, while his characters surprise and amuse.
The one that is a masterpiece of compression – Mothering Sunday (2016)
Swift’s 130-page novel is bigger on the inside than it looks from the outside. Jane Fairchild is looking back several decades on what were, for one wealthy Home Counties family and their maid, the fateful events of Mothering Sunday, 1924.
The heat, both in terms of the weather and sex scenes, is palpable in a tale of love across class divides. When the maid is left alone, the reader wanders the vast house with her – crucially, we see her reading books from the library, offering a tantalising hint at her future – before a beautifully-executed twist caps this mini-marvel of a novel.
