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Univerzitet u Novom Sadu

Filozofski fakultet

Odsek za engleski jezik i


književnost

CONTEMPORARY BRITISH NOVEL


Winter semester

PILGRIMAGE AND DISCOVERY / RITES AND RITUALS IN GRAHAM


SWIFT’S LAST ORDERS

Professor: Student:
March, 2011
Nina Ivanović Mudžeka PhD Darinka Marković 82/10
PILGRIMAGE AND DISCOVERY / RITES AND RITUALS IN GRAHAM SWIFT’S LAST ORDERS

“We have to keep scooping, scooping up from the depths this remorseless stuff that
time leaves behind”, says Tom Crick in Graham Swift’s Waterland (1983), one of the best of
the many novels of the Eighties where the recuperation of the past is a matter of concern. 1
In his novel Last Orders, Swift has the same objective of understanding the past. In other
words, Swift suggests that an exploration of the past may help to explain what and who we
are today.

Plot of the novel revolves around several characters who ponder over what was
lost and what was found in their lives so far. One event has triggered such introspection.
Four friends meet one day at their regular drinking-hour destination, a bar named ‘Coach’.
“It aint like your regular sort of day.” a predominant narrator Ray Johnson tells us. They
have gathered there to carry out the last wish of late friend, Jack Dodds. Ray is often trying
to make some joke about the Coach “never going nowhere”. On the opposite, with the bell
announcing that customers have to place their last orders, they will cast off on a spiritual
journey, a pilgrimage really, that will be challenging and above all informative. A trip which
resembles a Sunday outing is more than just that, they will discover a whole lot more about
themselves.

The compelling feeling to obey orders of a deceased man due to respect of the
dead, provokes the living to re-question their past actions, life in present and projections for
the future. An action of the novel is confined to the time frame of a single day, but
characters reminisce about their personal histories and inflate every thought with a sound-
alarming truth – they too will eventually turn into ashes. Jack had left a note addressing it
“to whom it may concern” where he expressed his death-bed wish of scattering his ashes
into the sea from the Margate shores. The choice of his final resting place has many
connotations and it is not made by chance.

People are naturally protected from the fear of death; they are tucked in their cozy
ordinary lives and enjoy the sweet lullaby of everyday simple things. It is a personal
experience, such as losing a best friend that sobers one instantly. These four men are about
to step into the sunset of their lives, except for Vince being the youngest of them all, and
this forces them to embrace a gloomy view of everything around and about them. They
needed a tangible proof that death can be just around the corner. They needed a strong
catharsis in their apathetic lives, a minor electrical shock to metamorphose dead flesh into
the living flesh.

1 Bradbury M., The Modern British Novel, London, (1994)

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Graham Swift rewrites the stream of consciousness choosing his words wisely.
The narrative which is not chronological, which intertwines past and present is perfect for
presenting the inner state of mind and soul. Journeys of soul are inevitably intertwined with
darkness, diversity and depth, but the human fear of darkness and diversity often erects
barricades that keep depth at a distance. Ray, Lenny, Vince, Vic, and Amy in a slightly
different way, are about to take a journey through the harshest and most puzzling realities
of life: concern of identity, dysfunctional families, war, death…

Last orders is another postmodernist piece of fiction, a woven fabric with a number
of linkages and allusions to other works of literature. Graham Swift manages well in using
intertextuality in his work. Most notable semiotic signs are those referring to T.S. Eliot’s The
Wasteland, William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, John
Bunyan’s The Pilgrim's Progress. By choosing such references which abound with grim and
ghoulish things, he chooses not to write about true happiness. The only rays of light which
are out of place in this gloomy atmosphere are joys of day-to-day simple things and
characters’ shiftless jokes.

The novel is presented as a quest narrative. The four pilgrims will not really descend
to the different rings of Hell, like in Dante’s Inferno. Having the wisdom of an old age they
are more likely to evaluate the importance of life. Ray and Jack met in North Africa and they
were comrades during the Second World War. They must have had near-to-death
experiences, like the one time in the desert when Lucky (Ray) pulled down Jack and saved
him from getting a bullet. Lenny, too, served in the war and still thinks of himself as Gunner
Tate (“Gunner Tate, middleweight. Always pissed. Always late”), and he used to practice
boxing. Vic served in the navy, and proposed the stop at the Naval Monument at Chatham
on the trip to Margate. Yet they seem naïve sometimes, romanticizing and day-dreaming
about the past. The only character who is happiest of them all is the one who has a dry,
matter-of-fact view of life and death. Vic Tucker with his witty sense of humor says: “There's
some who say I'm the next best thing to a vicar”…”We're Tuckers, we fix up dead people. It's
what we do for a living. We tuck 'em up.” He has it all prepared, he and his wife Pam have
reserved plots at Camberwell New Cemetery. But to put aside the discussion about final
destinations for a moment, a specific finish line at Margate shores asks for further
explanation.

Margate was developed in the nineteenth century to separate the wealthy from the
vulgar hordes. T.S. Eliot chose this resort to recuperate from his nervous breakdown. Eliot
was soothed and stimulated by the sea and found inspiration for the final section of Part III
of The Wasteland, 'The Fire Sermon'. Six of those lines concern Margate itself: “On Margate
Sands./I can connect/Nothing with nothing./The broken fingernails of dirty hands./My

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people humble people who expect/Nothing.”2 Opposite to The Wasteland inhabitants who
cannot connect to anything or anybody, four Londoners see Margate as a gathering point.
When they reach Margate it is a faded resort on England's southeast coast, with speck or
two of its former luster, it has tarnished over the past decades. The vigorous zest for living
they had in youth has faded as well. In part this was because they did not choose their life
paths freely. This refers to their professions. Jack Dodds wanted to become a doctor, but his
father had forced him to take over the family business, a butcher shop “Dodds and Son”.
The name itself shows how “great expectations” were, and Jack had to live up to them.

All the speakers in Last Orders ultimately speak to no one, apart from themselves.
No one hears them; their monologues pass each other. In addition, David Malcolm in his
work Understanding Graham Swift, depicts the narrator in a Swift text as “almost always a
sad, self-scrutinizing man, middle-aged or older, delving into his unhappy past in order to try
to work out how he got to the rather dispiriting situation in which he finds himself” 3. To
understand just how essential for them the journey to Margate Pier really is one must see
their struggles, problems and their whole lives through a magnifying glass.

What the characters do for a living and the alternative careers they hoped for, but
did not take up have an important relationship. Their miserable lives could be evident
example of what happens to a dream deferred. Or as Langston Hughes would put it “Does it
dry up/like a raisin in the sun? /Or fester like a sore--/And then run? /Does it stink like rotten
meat? /Or crust and sugar over--/like a syrupy sweet? /Maybe it just sags/like a heavy
load. /Or does it explode?” Lenny did not want to hang his boxing gloves or become a
grocery shop owner, but he did. On the other hand, Vic saw himself in the undertaker
profession as the natural order of things. He had experienced teasing of his friends for a
while, but he learned to make jokes about it.

What would have happened if there were different circumstances? It is a question


that bothers not only main but subsidiary characters as well. It is an ever prompting
question of every human being. The characters did not use well their tabulæ rasæ to draw
individual and imaginative pictures of life. The same were washed away by following other’s
footsteps. There was no place for them to make genuine discoveries about the very essence

2 Lawrence S. Rainey, Modernism: An Anthology, Wiley-Blackwell, (2005)

3 Malcolm D., Understanding Graham Swift, Univ of South Carolina Press, (2003)

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and meaning of life. Will this spiritual discovery eventually happen in the novel’s narrative?
A great deal yet remains to be found out.

Fifty years before the present point in the narrative, Jack met and fell in love with
his wife Amy. They were seasonal workers at Wick's Farm picking hops. Little Sally Tate and
her playground friend Vince were witty enough to call things the right name - hop-picking
was how babies were made. That was how their daughter June became the embodiment of
one night in hot June. Unfortunately, she was born as mentally challenged. Jack could not
cope with this fact and endeavored to forget all about her. On the other hand, Amy could
not abandon her daughter and went to see her twice a week. These visits were more similar
to visiting a graveyard than a mental hospital. June was living a life-in-death. This in part
explains why Amy chose not to go with the others and scatter Jack’s ashes. She went to
check for the last time if June would recognize her mother. She did not. It was the day of
letting go, the day of releasing the dead.

Amy’s going to the mental institution where June is accommodated is an act of


almost a religious devotion. She visited her daughter like a hermit would do repetitious
pilgrimages to a holy place. Both Amy and this imaginative hermit have one thing in
common. They revisit a shrine waiting for a miracle to happen. Ray, Vince, Vic and Lenny
likewise have made this specific bar named Coach a sort of a memorial shrine. It is the first
place they visit on the day of commemorating Jack’s death. Coach had witnessed both their
good and bad times. By constantly going there they can do nothing about bringing good old
times back. Idleness is a prevalent problem. The characters will discover that only by active
searching for happiness they actually acquire one.

Ray narrates almost a half of the novel. That is why he is a vivid character. “We call
him Lucky because he's lucky to be with, and on account of if you want to put a bet on, he’s
your man.”, while in hospital, Jack describes his friend to a nurse. But we learn through the
novel, that this insurance agent is not happy like he ought to be. His wife got into the mid-
life crisis and left him for another man. His daughter Sue had left him to accompany her
boyfriend back to Australia. He is depicted as a man having conscience. He has guilty
conscience for being attracted to hospital nurse Kelly, for loving his best friend’s wife Amy,
for losing the true connection with his daughter. And yet, Ray gives, or better said, radiates
hope to others in need. He provided Jack with “a winner” from hippodrome and annulated
his twenty thousand pounds worth debt. He accompanied Amy to visit June and selflessly
gave her support. And that was more than just that. One red camper-van could tell us a
bigger picture of what was going on in the past.

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PILGRIMAGE AND DISCOVERY / RITES AND RITUALS IN GRAHAM SWIFT’S LAST ORDERS

So far, we have broached the topic of failing fathers, and will continue within the
family context. Vince Dodds, who has lost his parents, the Pritchett family, became Jack’s
surrogate son. He adopted him to fill in the void left by June. Because of that, Vince will hold
a certain grudge against Jack for a long time. He did not choose to be a spare tire for
“Dodds-mobile”, circumstances had placed him there. In the future, he flees to the army,
trying to avoid the fate of following his father’s footsteps and becoming a butcher. There
was another reason to go and hide in the trenches - he impregnated his childhood
sweetheart, Sally Tate, Lenny’s daughter.

Animosity between Lenny and Vince is obvious throughout the novel. He blames
Vince for his daughter’s gradual estrangement from him and her painful downfall. Ray and
Vince are not much of friends either although he sold him the car park. Vince had become a
successful self-made man doing the job he loved the most, but he is not quite happy being a
father of another estranged daughter in the novel. The underlying animosity between four
friends vanishes first because of the common objective in a genuine pilgrimage, and that
would be seeing off Jack to the sea, and secondly, because as individuals they hoped for
spiritual cleansing. As we have seen, each individual has a tormented soul that needs re-
awakening.

Lenny says, “Daughters. Who'd have 'em?” Perhaps he is saying this because parents
cannot continue living through their children. Sons should be the ones who keep up
pursuing life path of their fathers and continue from where the elders left off. They should
finish what was started before. However, they have their own dreams to pursue, life paths
to choose and mistakes to make. (“We never really "own" them, do we?”). The concern of
identity emerges here, children have to leave a family nest to discover, to reinvent and
rebuild themselves. “Your own man? You never were your own man. You were your old
man's man, weren't you?” Vince says to Jack on one occasion. There are insurmountable
barricades between parents and children. Parents regret some of their past actions and wish
they had a second chance. They were wrong in believing that their children would make a
fresh start down the same road. The problem was that such a journey was not a progression
towards an improvement but rather a certain downfall.

Since we got a closer look into characters’ inner struggles and circumstances that
led to some of their major problems, we can analyze the underlying themes of pilgrimage
and discovery in more detail.

“The ship is safest when it’s in port. But that’s not what ships were made for”4
4 Zygmunt Bauman, “Globalization”

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According to Craig G. Bartholomew and Fred Hughes in their joint work Explorations
in a Christian theology of pilgrimage, “a pilgrimage becomes a call to reflection, to asking
profound questions, to using the journey to consider again our origins and our destination.
True pilgrimage always has a missionary end in mind”5. This proves that the journey to
Margate Pier is nothing less than a pilgrimage. It has a mission to it and the executors of a
given task will unquestionably perform it. One must not forget to examine individual aspects
of carrying out Jack’s last order. For instance, Ray feels indebted to his friend for a number
of reasons. Jack served as a kind of tutor to him and spiritual coach back in the war days.
The fact that he cheated Jack’s confidence by having an affair with his wife puts him in even
worse position.

The journey is not a one-way trip, there are unexpected diversions. Lenny says, “I
never knew this was a sight-seeing tour.” They stop at one pub in Rochester, Vince proposes
visiting one farm in Kent, Vic suggests going to Chatham and see the naval memorial and
Lenny conjures up plan of visiting the Canterbury Cathedral. On the day when they should
be commemorating the dead, they are not selfless all the way. They seek to fulfill at least a
wish or two of their own. This is actually an improvement in their thinking. They are the
ones who truly count anyway. They are the “living flesh”. There is an interesting dilemma,
why did Vince take for this trip one of his best cars, a royal blue Merc. “Then Lenny chuckles.
'Mind you, Big Boy, if he can't see us, if he can't see nothing, why d'you go and borrow a
Merc?” Was it because he wanted to please Jack’s boxed ashes? Of course not, a luxurious
car is a nice gesture but rather, Vince has a guilty conscience. He was not an ideal type of
son, at least not the ideal son Jack was dreaming about. He signed up for the army and
made his escape from schemed future his father wanted for him. Now The Prodigal Son
returns and gives i-am-sorry-dad gift to Jack’s funeral ceremony.

From the religious point of view, many ideas in the novel can be differently
interpreted. Characters do not specifically reveal their religious beliefs, and they do not
wonder once if Jack will go to Heaven, Elysian Fields, or the Pools of Perfect Peace or else.
They are kids of war who got disillusioned about religion. Even ‘vicar’ Tucker treats his
‘customers’ in an almost sterile and analytical kind of way. “Your job is to provide a decent

5 Craig G. Bartholomew & Fred Hughes, Explorations in a Christian theology of pilgrimage, Ashgate
Publishing, Ltd., (2004)

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funeral, decency and respect with regard to the final disposal, everyone deserves that. It's
not your job to pry. What you learn in this business is how to keep your mouth shut.”

So if they do not represent the most virtuous believers, what is the driving force that
moves them to obey Jack’s last orders? Feelings of love and friendship only are not a good
enough explanation, because then Amy should be accompanying them. They are not obliged
to obey if it were some military operation order either. We need to look up the answer in
Graham Swift’s favorite matter, in history.

The burning of the dead, cremation (lat. cremo = to burn) was invented during the
Stone Age, about 3000 BCE. It was most likely first used in Europe or the Near East. It
became the most common method of disposing of bodies by 800 BCE in Greece, and 600
BCE in Rome. Early Christians considered cremation pagan and it was widely associated with
Greek and Roman culture. According to John Robinson in Archæologia Græca, or The
antiquities of Greece (1827)6 “the custom of burning was generally practiced by the Greeks.
Some of them, indeed, considered burning as cruel and inhuman; and the philosophers
were divided in their opinions respecting it: they who thought that the human body was
compounded of water, earth, or the four elements were inclined to interment; but
Heraclitus and his followers, who imagined that fire was the first principle of all things, were
disposed to burning.”

Fire is excellent means of refining the celestial part of the man, by separating it from
the gross matter and impure qualities which attend it. In the last wish of Jack Dodds we can
see combining of the two rites. By cremation he wished his soul to be cleansed from past
sins, perhaps especially from the most severe sin of denouncing his daughter. When he
narrowed the selection of resting places to that of the sea, without knowing it or otherwise,
he implied the use of burial. The going back to the four elements in the Eternal Cycle of
Matter best depicts the closing paragraph “…and the ash that I carried in my hands, which
was the Jack who once walked around, is carried away by the wind, is whirled away by the
wind till the ash becomes wind and the wind becomes Jack what we're made of.”

Likewise to this Eternal Cycle of Matter, a life cycle of one person is an array of
important events. These important stages of characters’ life cycles are marked by specific
rituals - rites of passage. French socialist Arnold van Gennep found useful to divide such
ceremonies to three stages: separation, transition and incorporation; the first being the

6 Robinson J., Archaeologia Graeca Or The Antiquities Of Greece: Being An Account Of The Manners And
Customs Of The Greeks (1827), Kessinger Publishing, LLC (2010)

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removal of the individual from everyday society, followed by a period of isolation, and,
finally, formal return to society in his/her new status.7 This is what clearly mirrors in the
novel’s narrative. The main heroes are embarking on a journey that will lead them far away
from their home in South London. Jack's three closest friends, Ray, Vic, and Lenny - along
with Jack's son Vince give a lot of space to their own thoughts as we go through their
interior monologues in the narrative’s collage. The isolation is seen in their at times hidden
or otherwise apparent animosity like in Lenny and Vince’s fight over the Jack’s ashes. What
isolates them more is their wish to visit different places on the planned route for the
occasion. They perceive differently what the point of these detours is. For example, Vic is
isolated in the way how he feels much more sentimentally connected to the Navy Memorial
at Chatham. The symbolic return is seen in connection to how the characters have grasped
understanding of the present. They return to their lives as changed men ready to improve
the future. Perhaps Ray will contact his daughter and luckily have a chance to meet his
grandchildren.

Last Orders is preceded by two epigraphs. “But man is a Noble Animal, splendid in
ashes and pompous in the grave” comes from Sir Thomas Browne’s meditation on funerals
Urn Burial. The second is a quotation from a popular British music hall song "I Do Like To Be
Beside The Seaside" and it was written by John A. Glover-Kind and originally performed by
Mark Sheridan in 1909.

Sea is mentioned many times throughout the novel. Back-flashes into the characters’
past show that image of the sea draws up memories of some happier times. Amy and Jack
had their honeymoon at Margate. Vince remembers how Sunday outings to the sea made
him happy especially because Sally accompanied them. Mandy’s daydreams are about her
father. She likes to think he did not actually abandon her but rather become devoted to
maritime life.

Choosing sea as Jack’s eternal abode comes as natural since the sea has always been
compared to one’s soul, the celestial and the otherworldly. Thoreau once said “My life is
like a stroll on the beach...as near to the edge as I can go.” The seashore is place where real
world is tangible. It makes one feel safe and peaceful. Nature has furnished one part of the
earth, and man has another. When young Jack throws big yellow teddy bear from the end of
a pier into the sea, he throws effigy of his defective daughter. He sends her to oblivion of
the other world. Sir Thomas Browne in his work The Religio Medici, Chapter One, argues
about origins of various ways of interment. These were especially linked to ceremonial rites.

7 Van Gennep, A., The Rites of passage, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, (1960)

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He recounts: “Though earth hath engrossed the name yet water hath proved the smartest
grave; which in forty dayes swallowed almost mankinde, and the living creation”8. Scattering
Jack’s ashes at sea as opposed to the mere burial bares implicit notion of hope to rise again
and way to be seen again.

The element of exploration, the desire to discover is very important in pilgrimage.


Pilgrimage is not for the faithful who have nothing to discover. The stop at the Canterbury
cathedral immediately draws references from Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer’s
narrative tries to cover too much, from peasant to prince, while Swift focuses on more
particular points. The characters in Last Orders are not by chance war veterans. Those are
people who are often left out on their own, with no help of the community. “That’s no
country for old men” is something they could be thinking. However, such men who are little
in the eyes of system are big in spirit. When the four friends finally reach their final journey
point they will have their own small victory.

Obviously, the characters are not all the way the ones “who are afraid of Virginia
Woolf”, they are ready to start discovering some truths about themselves. The quest they
are undertaking is similar to the Grail quest, Jason and the Argonauts, or any myth alike in
one sense. Every such a quest must be moved to a faraway land, distant from everyday life
and surroundings. This in part explains the several stops they make on their way to the
Margate.

The goal of a quest here cannot be achieved by one individual - there is a group of
four of them. This pilgrimage has a powerful formative role for each person. Its goals are,
first to integrate the individual into a social group, and then to foster unfolding of the
individual therein. By the end of the novel, the reader sees how the characters have
somehow matured. They had examined a backpack of their lives filled with fears, struggles,
decisions and everything that goes with being a human. At a certain point, an already heavy
burden had to be loosened up a bit. The characters were doing so by throwing away leaden
of moving forward after one mentally challenged daughter, getting in touch again with
forgotten daughters, letting go the unfulfilled dreams of young days and many things more.
Ray, Lenny, Amy, Vic, Vince – all of them have done a big cleaning up in their lives which left
them hopefully happier than before. The idea of spiritual discovery is just that, having
removed all the malfunctions, they will experience the ground of being. We can think of this
as a state in which a pilgrimage and a set of ensuing rituals have induced a state of calmness

8 Browne T., W. A. Greenhill (Editor), Sir Thomas Brown's Religio Medici, Kessinger Publishing (March
2003)

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in which the characters can experience themselves as pure observation. Such self-
observation is pervading the whole novel but it is most accentuated in the very closing lines
with Jack’s ashes emerging with the omnipresent wind and spirit of the world.

Fowles claims in The Tree: “Every novel since literary time began, since the epic of
Gilgamesh, is a form of quest, or adventure.” Graham Swift adheres to this notion. The
prominent characters are not just merely making a sight-seeing tour of historical
monuments and places. They are “diving into the wreck” of their lives in order to search for
and grasp any possible meaning. The bitterness in their voices and narration somehow
proves that to a certain extent, they are critical minds willing to explore their past decisions
and actions. Their histories are not romanticized books which they made up for themselves
and safely stored on a shelf. Re-reading such histories and doing so on a new objective level
of thought is their primary concern.

CONCLUSION

One of the primary concerns of postmodernists, and by analogy, that of the work
of Graham Swift is a matter of history. In Last Orders, history serves the purpose of
following the line of exploration. Such spiritual discovery is mirrored in the tangible world as
well, in the form of a pilgrimage. The more progress the heroes of this novel make on the
road to Margate shores, they dig up further into the past. They are healed of a suffering
only by experiencing it to the full. Re-questioning of their past and long forgotten actions
and decisions makes them fully aware of their present and of what they truly are. To be
wholly of the present means to be fully conscious of one's existence as a man. Also, what
could spur such thinking in the minds of characters better than losing a close friend? They
act symbolically according to pre-established rituals which they see as means of marking
such an important event. A ritual serves well in lessening the social tensions which can be
perceived many times in the novel. The rituals also serve to reinforce the characters’
collective bonds and also to alleviate the individual suffering.

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REFERENCE

• Swift G., Last Orders, Picador, Macmillan (1996)*

• Bradbury M., The Modern British Novel, London, (1994)*

• Lawrence S. Rainey, Modernism: An Anthology, Wiley-Blackwell, (2005)*

• Malcolm D., Understanding Graham Swift, Univ of South Carolina Press, (2003)*

• Craig G. Bartholomew & Fred Hughes, Explorations in a Christian theology of pilgrimage,


Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., (2004)*

• Van Gennep, A. ,The Rites of passage, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, (1960)*

• Robinson J., Archaeologia Graeca Or The Antiquities Of Greece: Being An Account Of The
Manners And Customs Of The Greeks (1827), Kessinger Publishing, LLC (2010)*

• Browne T., W. A. Greenhill (Editor), Sir Thomas Brown's Religio Medici, Kessinger
Publishing (March 2003)*

• Pamela St. Clair ,Saying Good-bye: Graham Swift's Last Orders 2, Jan 1, 1999

http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/british_literature/90622/2, accessed on Dec 18, 2010

• Chris Fox, Graham Swift – ‘Last Orders’, May 09, 2010

http://la-terrasse.blogspot.com/2010/05/graham-swift-last-orders.html, accessed on Dec 18,


2010

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PILGRIMAGE AND DISCOVERY / RITES AND RITUALS IN GRAHAM SWIFT’S LAST ORDERS

• Wenkai Tay, "Last Orders", Nov 30, 2003

http://www.mostlyfiction.com/world/swift.htm, accessed on Feb 2, 2011

• Heike Hartung-Brückner, History and "Englishness" in Graham Swift's Last Orders


(Part1), Institut für Englische Philologie, Freie Universität Berlin

http://www.postcolonialweb.org/uk/gswift/lastorders/hhb1.html, accessed on Feb 2, 2011

• Ann Skea, Last Orders by Graham Swift

http://www.eclectica.org/v1n2/skea.html, accessed on Dec 18, 2010

• Ana Drobot, Virginia Woolf and Graham Swift: Similarities

http://ezinearticles.com/?Virginia-Woolf-and-Graham-Swift:-Similarities&id=5165606, accessed
on Jan 29, 2011

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• Kent Williams, Last Orders, May 31, 2002

http://www.thedailypage.com/isthmus/article.php?article=3779, accessed on Jan 29, 2011

• Lisa J. Lehr, Cremation vs. Traditional Burial, August 22, 2008

http://www.uwillfind.com/articles/article-421.html, accessed on Jan 17, 2011

* Available at http://books.google.com/books/, ©2011 Google

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