A while back I put in my "Current & recent reading" column a capsule review of 
Graham Swift's 2003
novel The Light of Day. I said then that it was the first thing I had read by him, but that he had immediately become one of my favorite authors. It used the typical hard-boiled detective genre, with the jaded former police detective's touchy relationships with his acquaintances still on the force and with a mysterious femme fatale. It adapted the genre, though, making it much more reflective and nuanced, at the same time more melancholy and more hopeful. Moving back and forth between the present, the recent past and the more distant past he explored how both the detective and the femme came to be where they were. Since then I have explored more of his work.
Next I read Last Orders, his 1996 novel that won him the Man Booker Prize. On the surface it is about four friends, somewhat, who have been charged by a fifth friend's will to dispose of his ashes in the sea. On that level, the entire action of the novel runs less than a day. Actually, it encompasses fifty years or more in the lives of these five men and their families. From a technical viewpoint this must have been much more challenging to write than The Light of Day, because besides moving back and forth in time, it shifted back and forth constantly from one character's point of view to another. There were a lot more characters, too. Sometimes, in fact, I had trouble for a few sentences after such a shift figuring out just who was talking, and until I was well into the book I kept a second bookmark on a page that happened to lay out who was married to whom. If I had an Englishman's understanding of the areas they drove through, their odyssey might have come alive for me more. All this kept me from enjoying this book quite as much as I did Light of Day, but that may have been a reflection of my more traditional taste in fiction. I would still strongly recommend the book anyway.
Just a few days ago I finished his newest novel, Tomorrow. For me, this was the best of the three by far.
It had The Light of Day's sole point of view and Last Order's recapitulation of several interconnected lives over a lifetime. In fact, it had both of those to a higher degree than either the of first two I read. It is entirely a soliloquy, delivered between midnight and dawn by a wife and mother to her 16 year old twins sleeping elsewhere in the house. This elaborate reweaving of memory is occasioned by the events of the coming day, when long concealed secrets, or at least one of them, will be revealed. In it she reviews the long story of the life she and her husband have shared, along with their parents, their children, a few other relatives and friends, and a pet who remains mysterious until well into the book.
This book certainly took its share of drubbing in the relatively few Amazon customer reviews it got, and I could understand some of their objections, with the exception of the fool who thought she was going to be reading "the sex book." There is no action as such; it's one person sitting quietly in bed, thinking to herself. The secrets she recalls don't seem like such a big deal, either, compared to the secrets in some books and in some people's lives. None of that seemed to me like the point of the book, though. It was about the way we construct out of life's events, both those chosen and those that befall us, and out of the ceremonies we devise to commemorate those events, meaning for our lives.
Humans have always done that, but we may rely on it more now because we move through a universe that seems meaningless to us moderns, stripped as we are of the ancient coat of teleology, of divinely ordained purpose we used to wear to keep ourselves warm. It may seem like it would be a poor coat we have now, cobbled together out of births, deaths, marriages, special journeys and odd coincidences, but if it is woven with long, persistent, careful attention and reflection, it can be a tight enough weave to resist any storm. Narrative lines cross over and over in this book and in our lives and become tangled together in a way that can be unbreakable, a treasure to be passed on to future generations.
While I was reading Tomorrow a hold I had had at the library for some time on the movie Last Orders finally came through. This was a wonderful movie, although I have to admit that we watched it with subtitles turned on so that we could understand all the dialog--there was no compromising the authenticity of its working class English for American ears. The problem I had with the book, its diffusion over several points of view, didn't bother me at all in the movie. That was probably due in part to the visual nature of the movies and in part to decisions Fred Schepisi, the director made, but I think much of the credit should be given to the performance of Bob Hoskins. Even in scenes with great, showy actors like Michael Caine and Helen Mirren he maintains his understated ways but holds your attention. There were also top notch performances by Tom Courtenay, best remembered, if at all, for The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) and Doctor Zhivago (1965), and by David Hemmings, best remembered for Michelangelo Antonioni's Blowup (1966). Hemmings' role in that movie did more than all other movies put together to increase the sales of SLR cameras among geekish but hormonally normal young men. I know. If you want to see what ravages time can work, though, try doing a Google image search for David Hemmings Blowup, and then another search for David Hemmings Last Orders. It's pretty funny.
