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It’s typical of Ray that the affair seems to come to an end when Vince starts to live in the van, after fourteen happy weeks. The central event of the novel is the laying to rest of the remains of Jack Dodds, family butcher, who has left instructions that he wants his ashes scattered off the end of a pier in Margate, a faded resort on England’s southeast coast. Nik Powell, head of the independent production company Scala, signed on as an executive producer and during the summer of 2000 brought in German-based Rainer Mockert and MBP to help with the financing. This book focuses on ex-servicemen and their families dealing with the aftermath of war and the changes that disrupt the traditional way of life. There are inevitably jokes about who’ll be next, how Ray and Lenny would appreciate it if Vic didn’t go before them.

Their pilgrimage, underlined by a brief stop in Canterbury, ends with them casting their friend’s ashes to the turbulent April winds. It contributes to his aggressive reputation in the playground, based on his reaction to taunts that he isn’t really Jack and Amy’s son. Lovely Sally, falling pregnant, having the illegal abortion Amy never had, and ending up with a life more desolate and constrained than Amy's ever was. In another chapter Amy describes their one weekend in Margate, a sham of a late honeymoon after June’s birth and Jack’s immediate rejection of her.One or other of Jack’s friends—they all knew him in different ways, not that this means any of them were best mates—is pretty sure Jack didn’t have enough money for his retirement project. Locations included the London areas of Peckham and Bermondsey, Eastbourne, Canterbury, Chatham, Margate, and Rochester. Jack talked a lot about his good friend Ray and asked Vince for a considerable sum of money as a favor.

Schepisi met potential cast members and forged commitments with Michael Caine, Tom Courtenay, Bob Hoskins, and Ray Winstone. Homage", incidentally, being just the word Swift used in an interview with Salon magazine nearly a full year before before Frow started complaining – and even before Swift won the Booker. A lot of the resentment from Vince came from the fact that he knew he was an orphan whose parents were killed in WWII. At first, Lenny gets several good hits in on Vince and shouts insults, but then Vince gets Lenny in a chokehold and knocks him down.Then we’re in the final chapter, Margate, and it’s only when they’re on the pier that Ray decides to give Vince his money back. Without having seen it, I predict the adaptation to be about as direct as is possible, given the absolute literalism of the casting.

Vince, eyes forward and saying nothing at first, swings the car off the main road and heads—who knows where? We’d already had hints of a sense of purpose slowly settling on them before they enter, and now these four men, none of whom has ever set foot inside before, are awed by its seriousness. It’s the blokeishness of an older generation—Swift must have been about Vince’s age when he wrote this, not that of the older characters—and it’s one of them, Ray, who holds the thread of the day’s journey.Over the years Jack barely acknowledged her existence but Amy faithfully visited her weekly, even though June had no idea of who she was or why she visited. Swift plumbs the existentialist questions of identity and the meaning of existence while remaining true to the vocabulary, social circumstances and point of view of his proletarian characters. Without a touch of patronisation, they sink into their characters and never attempt to steal scenes from each other. Another was the idea that Vince would follow him to be the next ‘and Son,’ a project Vince sabotaged by signing up for the army for five years. Its structure meant I had to invest time in working out who was who, the various family relationships etc, but once those were clear the short chapters and the alternating perspectives meant the narrative had a lot of pace, despite the relative lack of incident.

It was in her story (or, more aptly, lack of) that I remembered what I’d found most intriguing about Swift’s writing and philosophy. George Webb, a divorced ex-cop and the narrator of this fine novel, works as a private investigator in London specializing in "matrimonial work": finding evidence of philandering. He’s looking for the connection he’s never been able to feel, and he’s trying to do something for Jack in a way he’s never done in his life. Ray knew that Jack refused to visit his daughter, June in the institution and started giving Amy a ride in his camper van.In June 1996, Swift declared that it was a homage to Faulkner's book but there were various differences. She is able to give us a lot of insights into how Jack picked her up at Billingsgate, how ambiguous it is whether he fancied her, as she believed, or was just looking for another daughter-substitute as Vince thinks. Do you find as a result that you feel closer to, or more sympathetic with, Ray’s experience than any of the others? When it was first published, comparisons were made with Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying: multiple (male) narrators conveying the last remains of someone close, on a journey that reveals things about each of them as they go. We can’t know precisely how angry she is when she comes home to find out not only of the possibility of the move to Australia, but that it’s more or less an agreed fact.