Suffice it to say that the dying man has another, more furtive design involving money and gambling. Behind this journey there are secret histories and motives which it would spoil the fun to reveal. There are public monuments in Chatham and Canterbury at which we predictably linger. Seventeen of the novel's 75 sections are headed with place names that flash up like road-signs, or the stations of a more sacred progress. Jack Dodds wants his ashes scattered off Margate pier, for instance, and we follow the route taken by four of the mourners, all men, from the Coach and Horses in Bermondsey. A dying man issues some last orders to his wife and old mates and adopted son. Last Orders re-works much of this matter in ingenious ways. And women? Quite a lot of question-marks, too. Men are abashed at their own lack of manhood and envious of others. Children are orphaned, adopted, abandoned, fugitive. Some gallows-humour: like the one about the hospital nurse who, literally, just takes the piss. War in north Africa and on the North Sea. There is plenty of Swift's regular matter in Last Orders, that old-fashioned thing 'the family', its griefs and scars and vacancies.
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