If this is representative of some of the best modern British literature, I feel a bit underwhelmed. Four mates (or acquaintances) decided to get together on a road trip at a request of their deceased friend — to throw his ashes into the ocean. Each of the men come from different backgrounds — Ray, the insurance clerk; Vince, the secondhand car modifier and salesman; Vic, the undertaker and Lenny, a local farmer. Their deceased friend, Jack Dodds was an unfulfilled butcher himself. The span of the book is the trip between Bermondsey to Margate with recollections of the past scattered in between. As the past unfolds, we learn more about each characters and how they relate to their deceased mate.
The anchor of the story is Ray, the insurance clerk whose perspective is more predominant than the rest, and where the chapters are labelled as one of the places (such as Bermondsey), it is Ray’s perspective that we borrow. However, other characters outside of the participants of the trip also weigh in their two pennies, such as Jack’s wife Amy — more committed to her mentally handicapped daughter, June.
Swift modelled the structure of the book on Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying with its constant narrator changes and the actual plot of delivering the remains of the dead while making a mess of it. It becomes an odyssey of sorts, but not anywhere near long, complex or intelligent as either Faukner or Joyce. In fact, the more I learn about these characters, the less I care about them. They are as boring as middle-class white men can get — from their professions, their interactions and their life problems. Sure there are some infidelities and sleeping around here and there — some bad blood because someone’s feeling got hurt, but I don’t feel like that any point in time that I’d care for any of them. I ended up treating this book as a floor mat.
But I am peeved that somehow this dogshit snagged the Booker prize. Not that I cared much about who wins old bookie, because over the years some ambiguous work enjoyed their time in the sun. Still, this book is an oddball choice to enjoy the esteemed company of Life of Pi, The Famished Road, The Sellout to name some. I struggle to pick up the significance of the themes the book attempt to touch on: the nature of friendship, the relationship between the past and present, parenthood, getting old, the “English” character. Not even the presence of all the pints of beers, drunk by the characters or the reader, can avoid its mediocrity. Yep, not even that Booker prize sticker in front of the book, gov.
