1In reference to a question and answer in a debate thirteen years ago, in Nice, on the occasion recalled by Graham Swift in ‘I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside: Nice, 1997’ in Making an Elephant, I would like to revisit an intuition of mine which our liberal and courteous guest had smiled away and gently denied at the time, that is the presence of a Proustian strain in his approach to the delicacy and intricacy of emotions.

Death in Anglo-land

4With the inevitable hindsight attending a rereading of the novel, we may notice that Last Orders constantly, if diffidently, keeps striking a contemporary chord. In spite of the relative anachronism, one may contrast it with the recent obsessive reflections on personal death in Julian Barnes’s Nothing To Be Frightened Of or with Howard Barker’s stark confrontation with the ultimate impassable in Death The One and the Art of Theatre.

5Last Orders reconstructs a lower middle-class social milieu in the 1980s, with its various inhibitions and suppressions, especially in the disruptive territory of death. Generally speaking, death seems to have absconded from contemporary Western and more specifically British society. It has been all but erased from everyday life, except on rare occasions like the collective catharsis set off by Princess Diana’s tragic demise in 1997, one year after the publication of Last Orders. Such a deletion is made even more telling in the novel by the radical choice of cremation, even though this alternative to interment now seems to have become more generally accepted. The 2009 statistics for England indicate that 76 % of burials took the form of cremation. The text is found repeatedly to lay bare the suppressed anguishes inherent in its abrasive finality, for instance when a hand is disturbingly dipped into Jack’s ashes, first by Vince in the hop-country of Kent and then twice by the four protagonists at Margate. The abhorrent idea of fingering what is, and no longer is, a man’s body seems to lie more on the side of affect than of emotion, but it has been defused in advance, and burlesqued by the names given to the urn that is alternately a ‘jar’ (10), a ‘box’, ‘hogg[ed]’ by Vic (46), held ‘like . . . a toy’ by Lenny (150), that becomes the ‘bag’ after the stop in Rochester, and is called Jack in Canterbury Cathedral (193). It is coveted and bandied around as a thing to nurse or a missile-like object of contention. And yet there remains a vague malaise in us, also reinforced by the theatrical framing of cremation itself, the coffin disappearing behind a stage curtain (79 and 272) and the door of the incinerator looking like the ‘back exit of a cinema’ (214). As if to confirm our deep-seated unease, Vic, the undertaker by profession, is described as ‘half lord and half leper’ (214). Added to this, abortion as the deliberate termination of a new life, keeps surfacing in Lenny’s tortured memories (208), and as a refused possibility for Amy in the case of June (253 and 275). Such tensions centring on death culminate obliquely and all the more poignantly in the moments before Amy’s last visit to her vegetative daughter on her fiftieth birthday, in her final admission of defeat, facing a pointlessly continued ‘life’ and her husband’s death: ‘What I’m trying to say is Goodbye June. Goodbye Jack. They seem like one and the same thing’ (278).

6In reality the apparent taboo concerning death in contemporary England is only a component of the restriction and the repression of emotion itself, or rather of the public show of emotion, and the dreaded loss of self-control it is usually taken to be, particularly for men, English men possibly more than others. Ray’s distanced and often disparaging ways of alluding to tears epitomise this kind of self- and group deprecation: ‘leaking at both ends’ (111), ‘pissy eyes’ (112), ‘blubbing’ (114, 140), ‘wet’, ‘gooey’ (150), ‘spluttering’ (151), ‘wiping his face’ (151), ‘what’s going on in my face’ (290), ‘a blur’ (294), etc., are some of the derogatory words or purposely factual renderings used to allude to tears. Such strategies are all the more telling as they refer to the secret side of the private sphere, and make us intuit the pathetic comedy of extenuating pretences on the shy arena of the self. Conversely, Vince sees himself as ‘straight’, ‘tall’, ‘proud and stiff’, ‘upright’ (199), ‘a tower’, ‘a mast’ for Jack ‘to climb up [him]’ (188); his neck is said to have ‘gone all tight and rigid’ (141), whereas Lenny, the ‘sloucher’ (129), suggests physiological decay in his temperamental and belligerent physical weakness. The latter admits moreover, still privately, that ‘there never was much brain there in the first place’ (176). In their opposite ways both rigidity and frailty denote corresponding, if inverted, ways of both repressing and expressing emotion. The proscription about showing it is compounded by the fact this expedition to Margate is a sort of stag-party—Amy sneers: ‘Boys’ outing. Do’em good’ (19)—between pub buddies who have chummed up for ages and are all on edge concerning what each thinks of each (Vince v. Lenny Vic above and Ray in-between). Ray’s remark when Vic starts speeding after the visit to Chatham ‘I can feel Vic feeling it’s all his fault’ (142) could apply to each of them, how their hypersensitivity makes them vibrate and react to the least remark or response of any member in the group.

7All react to death in a typically contemporary way. They tend to approach it sideways, to sidle along in its direction. Their itinerary to Margate vividly illustrates their hesitating strategy, their tangential, nearly zigzag approach to the terminal moment when scattering the ashes cannot be escaped. They temporise and procrastinate on their way to this unbearably mandatory goal. Not for them Howard Barker’s direct and repeated confrontation with its unbridgeable unknowing as in Death the One and the Art of Theatre. And religion is no help either, beyond vague superstitions about the dead seeing them (225) or the decorum Vic ‘the [c]aptain on the bridge’ (291), or the ‘vicar’ (215), tries to preserve. Anxiety and dread keep surfacing in the text and explain the pitiable stratagems of the protagonists, one moment nearly getting drunk, the next traipsing the ashes round Canterbury cathedral, before fighting over them. The agonising factuality of decaying flesh, with the half-suppressed spectacle of Ray’s body eaten up by cancer, transpires in Vince’s painfully distanced observation: ‘his belly all swolled up like he’s pregnant’ (266). Again, the unease we are then made to experience bears witness to responses rooted in elementary affects, originating in a proprioceptive menace causing a kind of repressed counter-identification. But the text never plays up to such disturbing material. Its achievement is to keep to its symptoms as manifested in the diverse members of the group, to lay open its piercing violence and the pathetic, because partially bottled-up, reactions it causes, while not giving in to them, not surrendering to any melodramatic dimension.

Telling and Showing

9This keen foray into the illogical logic of emotion is achieved through both telling and showing, the first one relying on a multifocal narration, the second on ways of writing that might be said to be close to the poetic.

10‘Telling’, first. The narrative means resorted to are perfectly adapted to such a vigilant delineation of the variables in feelings, their mysteries and inconclusiveness. The story is told by seven narrators, Ray’s frequent return to the pulpit giving him the overarching function of framing the progression of the group towards Margate. As a protagonist though, his reactions are just as relative, highly strung and comically or tragically biased as those of the others. The strength, but also the difficulty of this procedure for us readers, is that it conjoins seven disparate and in medias res visions and consequently necessarily diverging experiential worlds. Its advantages, and its dangers, are those of what could be called structural dramatic irony. We are exposed to the illusions of a kind of omniscience since we understand more about each character than any of them can ever hope to. A typical example is Vince’s ‘chapter’ limited to his ‘Old buggers’ (130), each of the said ‘buggers’ being unaware of what Vince thinks. On the other hand, the often reminiscing characters refer to more than we can understand since what they think steeps us into private streams of thought, forcing us to piece together meanings we cannot fully grasp yet, and are never quite sure to have actually understood. Knowing both too much and not enough is the constant spring of the story that impels our reading. The general structure might be said to be that of a puzzle, with the risk attached to a finished and immovable arrangement, were it not that certain elements find no place anywhere in the grid or remain doubtful and even hypothetical. Amy, and her daughter June, stand for such missing slots whose absence fractures the whole construction, conferring it openness, in Umberto Eco’s conception of the simultaneous presence of conflicting, but equally valid, lines of interpretation. The two physical itineraries of Amy’s bus ride to her last visit to June, and the erratic progression of the men to Margate, never fit together. The gap in each protagonist’s understanding, the impossibility of even bridging it now that death has foreclosed any future concord or unity, leaves them all, especially Amy, in the grip of dilemmas now become unsolvable. Such is the ruthless truth of death which the most moving moments in the text uncover, in the dereliction it causes and in its finality.

11On the other hand, one must recognise the perilous facility attached to this narrative technique, that of suspense itself: trying to know what happened and anticipate what is going to happen, we might seem to feel more than reflect. Which is also the case of identification, with its own dangers: for instance, we side with the powerful, though reticent, figure of Vince in the pleasing illusion of being more alert to his rather tortured emotions, than he himself is. And this tends to be repeated with all the other protagonists. In a way, the juxtaposition of separate destinies united in this last journey might seem to reinforce the diverse effects of the structural dramatic irony. Most importantly though, the collage of voices keeps suggesting the contrary idea of a world in which nothing really fits with anything. Nobody can ever know what the persons around actually think, and what happens is never quite what was expected. The result is that if a general enlightenment, at once emotional and philosophical, is somehow brought about, the text never stops foregrounding at the same time the irremediably enigmatic nature of the facts of life.

13The intricacies of emotion and memory are made so to speak tangible by a series of objective correlatives whose return has the musical quality of leitmotifs. Among the most indirectly powerful, beyond the urn itself, is what Vince calls ‘motorvation’ (71): ‘passion wagons’ in reference to Vince and Mandy and their love-making on back seats (102), and the inextricable linkage between car mechanics love (Vince’s ‘handiwork on the latest motor’ [102], and his affair with Mandy); the Mercedes, a kind of hearse, especially in the final moments of its approach to Margate pier, both a symbol of elegance and decadence or even corruption since Vince has ‘sold’ his daughter to a prospective ‘Ayrab’ buyer (166) (in the same line as his luxurious suit and shoes finally bespattered with mud); the camper and the illicit love séances, the bus taking Amy in her weekly visit to her daughter and its mechanical to-and-fros (as in Virginia Woolf’s ‘Kew Gardens’), like the armies moving, retreating and moving back again from Egypt to Lybia, during World War Two (90); and behind it all, the enlargement to the arbitrary assignment of destiny in ‘Civvy Street’, which Lenny calls a ‘bleeding billet’ (132). The central correlative is obviously the double jetty and pier at Margate. It is first the site of Amy’s lost love in the shape of a teddy-bear thrown into the sea at the extremity of the now derelict jetty by young Jack. The shedding of his ashes at the jutting end of the pier may be seen as conclusively reversing and confirming this initially catastrophic gesture. Also the ‘Garden of England’, four times referred to: twice by Vince (64 and 106), and twice by Amy (234 and 240). The expression echoes jeeringly in Vince’s ‘bleeding garden of Aden’ (157). The reference to the original love scene is at once accompanied and reverberated by the elliptic ‘This is where’. Vince refers to it, as a sort of illicit sesame to his love affair with Mandy: ‘I never took her further—down Memory Lane. I could’ve stopped, just like Jack did, and said, This is where’ (102). It first appears in Vince’s description of the family’s visit to the spot when he was still a boy: ‘That’s where your mum and me first met’ (64). It comes back, as a kind of cryptic and solemn formula, at the emotional climax in Kent when Vince throws some of Jack’s ashes from the very edge of the hill: ‘“This is where,” he says, wiping his face. “This is where”’ (151). It finally returns in Amy’s reminiscences, as if in answer to Vince, the formula now somehow assuming the tone of an interrupted litany: ‘Yes it was here, Vince, here. This was where. Here in the garden of’ (240). These, and others, like borrowed money, compose a sort of emotion garnering chain. They are catalysts whose affective potency transforms them into local keys, elusively condensed emblems of the book as a whole. All are positive, if sometimes enigmatic, determinants of emotion.

Distance