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At one point, he actually signed up to the Foreign Legion just to escape the pressure for a few years.

He pretended he couldn’t do it himself because he had another appointment—and all the time, he’s letting us know how much he despises the ‘towel-headed’ foreigner made rich by oil. We go there for enjoyment, yet at the same time it is an elemental zone where land and water meet and thus, with or without the presence of cliffs, it is implicitly precarious.Another of Jack’s friends, Vic Tucker, thinks about his life as an undertaker: unlike Vince, he did choose his family’s business; unlike Jack, he never resented it. He’s a natural fighter, literally at first—he was a middleweight boxer before the war—and he’s permanently chippy. At the point I’ve reached, it’s still only the late morning, and we know there’ll be a lot more to come about these men’s lives.

The exhausting climb up the hill is another reminder of failing powers for Ray, noticing Lenny struggling—and, more urgently, the need to take a leak…. It starred a who’s who of Brit thesp royalty, including Michael Caine (of course), Ray Winstone as his screen son (makes sense), Bob Hoskins (playing Lucky, obviously) and Helen Mirren as Amy. More seriously, on this side, I did get a repeated sense that in a novel that trumpets its multiple voices as a virtue (using them as chapter headings, etc) many of those voices felt remarkably similar to Graham Swift (with a cockerney accent. Vic is the one who proposes the first little diversion from their route to Margate after their pub stop.His death from cancer in St Thomas' Hospital brings together four men who take a journey to scatter his ashes. In 2003 he published The Light of Day, which explores a private investigator’s relationship with a client convicted of murdering her husband. 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. Vince himself was happy to put up with the ineradicable smell of meat in the back, despite Jack’s best efforts to clean it, for the sake of time with Sally. I must have read my first storybooks – I mean the first ones I would have read solely for pleasure, not just for learning how to read – and, like many kids, been enchanted by them, but, unlike most kids, I must have said to myself: wouldn’t it be great to be one of these people who can produce this stuff to be found in the pages of books?

Vince knows he definitely is not Jack’s son, proudly displaying his ‘VIP’ initials on his army kit bag and telling Mandy how his real parents were killed by a type of bomb she’s never heard of. Set in 1924, in an England still reeling from the loss of young men to the Great War, this elegiac tale offers a haunting portrait of lives in a world in transition. There seems to have been something missing for Jack ever after—we remember that fantasy of becoming a doctor—and a lot of it is to do with his own role as a father. Swift's stunning new novel (after Light of Day) begins with deceptive slowness, detailing the lives of Jack and Ellie, the English husband-and-wife proprietors of a trailer park on the Isle of Wight.In a year when the Women’s Prize for Fiction was formally launched, it feels appropriate that the winner this year is a representative of exactly the kind of predictable, safe, male/middle class establishment that the average person on the street probably imagines when they think of the Booker, and with a book that fits all the cliches (at least superficially) of that “genre. He gets out with Jack's ashes; the rest of the group has no idea why they are there or what is happening. The cover may have some limited signs of wear but the pages are clean, intact and the spine remains undamaged. But at the memorial, Lenny is suspicious of a conversation Vince and Ray seem to be having out of sight and earshot. There's 4 main characters ( 5 if U include Jack ) but U have to remember the names of their wives and kids as well.