Graham Swift's Last Orders (1996)

Woolf's Mrs Dalloway (1925), and Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano (1947) - the
limited present of the novel serves as an opportunity for the characters to recount
and explore events from their past lives. There memories and musings in turn
illuminate and embellish the present of the narrative, which becomes considerably
more resonant and complex in the process, A subtle, psychologically probing novel
reminiscent in particular of Failkner's As I Lay Dying and Woolf's Mrs Dalloway,
Last Orders muses on death and dying, on complex familial relationships and memory,
and on the potent and uncanny impact of the dead on living. As Salman Rushdie puts
it, Last Orders is "about the ritual of the death, this last rite of passage."5
Born in south London in 1949, Graham Swift was the son of a civil servant who
served as a naval pilot during the Second World War ( perhaps unsurprisingly, many
of Swift's novels take the war as their chronological point of departure and chief
point reference). Graham Swift studied English literature at Queen's College,
Cambridge University, graduating in 1970, following which, in 1973, he completed a
Master's degree at York University. At York Swift devoted incresing amouts of time
to his creative writing ( he claims at this time to have been "pretending to be a
student" while in fact he was "teaching himself to write" fiction6), an avocation
that he continued while teaching school in London (where he now lives) and Greece
in the years that followed. The critical and popular success of his third novel,
Waterland (1983), allowed Swift to abandon teaching and turn full-time to creative
writing.
Although Swift has published well-regarded stories that appeared in his
collection Learning to Swim and Other Stories (1982) and elsewhere, it is
principally his novels - The Sweet Shop Owner (1980), Shuttlecock (1981), Waterland
(1983), Out of this World (1988), Ever After (1992), Last Orders (1996), and The
Light of Day (2003) - for which he is best known and most critically acclaimed.
Swift's breakthrough novel, as noted above, was his third, Waterland (1983),
which attracted as much critical attention as the rest of his early novels
combined, and which one critic deemed "as significant to the 1980s as The French
Lieutenant's Woman was for the 1970s."7 Simultaneously "a murder confession, a
history of Engaland's fen country , an indictment of the modern world for its
ignorance of history, as essay on the life of the eel, a meditation on the shapes
of time - in short, a grim intertwining of incest, suicide, and murder played
gainst two hundred years of family history and an apocalytic sense that time may be
coming to an end,"8 Waterland, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, did for
the Fens in eastern England what Great Expectations did for the marshes Kent and
Wuthering Heights did for the

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