Graham Swift: Last Orders (1996)

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

In Nights at the Circus gender politics are complicated and critiqued by socialist politics. In Last Orders the politics of social class are imbricated with those of gender. “It aint like your regular sort of day” (1). Last Orders, Graham Swift’s sixth Booker prize-winning novel, plunges the reader from its opening sentence into the lower-class demotic speech patterns and accompanying modes of thinking and behaving that constitute the world of this novel. That world is confined to the lives of working-class characters who, even when they leave Bermondsey, a borough in South London, manage to take its ethos with them. Despite the wide attention that has been paid to this novel, which a number of critics and reviewers consider to be equal to or better than his third novel, Waterland (1983), relatively little attention has been paid to ways in which all its characters have been interpellated by the behavioral norms of their working-class identity. To what extent are all the characters in Last Orders circumscribed by the class to which they belong? And how is the formation of their identity by their membership of a particular class modified by their gender, age, nationality, and other such potentially determining factors? Alternatively, to what extent do the characters escape from the limitations of income, vocabulary, and outlook that is traditionally associated with South London’s working-class population?