Lenny is rueful about the fact that five years later she could have had it done legally by a competent doctor…. But in truth it’s not really a style that’s my cup of tea, and in all honesty had I not been able to put an actor’s face to each character it’s doubtful that I would have persevered to the end. Nothing could more embody this than the seaside pier – a flimsy-looking structure dedicated to fun and frivolity, deliberately constructed over the crashing waves. In a novel in which each character speaks without the intervention of a narrator, the issue of individualized voices becomes crucial. It’s a strikingly simple story where little happens, but where we warm to the frailty and vulnerability of these flawed, human characters as we learn more about them.

At best it will be a celebration of life and at least, when times get hard, it will be a glow in the dark.He narrates occasional chapters with place-names for titles—Bermondsey, New Cross and so on—suggesting some kind of central role. I can’t remember which of them remarks about what a leveller it is—perhaps remembering how the officer class in war had no special privileges in death—but it doesn’t really matter.

Their pilgrimage, underlined by a brief stop in Canterbury, ends with them casting their friend’s ashes to the turbulent April winds. What are some other instances in which specific remembered events work to build up the reader’s sense of time passing in the lives of these characters? 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. As they drive towards the fulfillment of their mission, their errand becomes an extraordinary journey into their collective and individual pasts. Chapters earlier, this story had made Vince the object of ridicule at school after he gets the idea that babies somehow come from hop-picking.

If fiction can come alive in this way then it will always be on the side of life, it will always have vitality, even when dealing, as it often does, with the more painful aspects of human experience. The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2001 and was shown at the San Sebastián Film Festival, the Warsaw Film Festival, the Reykjavik Film Festival, and the London Film Festival before opening in the US on 7 December 2001. Lenny has never forgiven Vince for his treachery concerning his son-in-law and the stolen car, but it comes out as outrage that Vince is daring, with no agreement from the others, to attempt to take the lid off the jar holding Jack’s ashes. It won the Booker Prize in 1996 and a film of the novel was produced in 2001, directed by Fred Schepisi and starring Michael Caine, Tom Courtenay, Bob Hoskins, Helen Mirren, Ray Winstone, and others.