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A lot of the resentment from Vince came from the fact that he knew he was an orphan whose parents were killed in WWII. Jack borrowed money from Vince and gave it to Ray, asking him to gamble it for him and give the winnings to Amy.

Her husband is a small-time crook and—soap plot alert—was grassed up by Vince when he tried to get him to sell a stolen car for him. Four men once close to Jack Dodds, a London butcher, meet to carry out his peculiar last wish: to have his ashes scattered into the sea at Margate. It's a striking enough opening and, viewed retrospectively, a witty summary of the rest of the book, which takes place over the course of one fraught day. Things are being slowly revealed to us about these men and their lives, and there might well be secrets some of them don’t know about.We gather fairly quickly that June was born severely brain-damaged, has the mind of a baby according to one of or other of the men. 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. There are bantering friendships among men who only meet regularly in the pub, reputations based on hearsay and gossip—it’s Lenny, I think, who complains about Ray not sharing his luck enough—and women they know about but don’t really know.

This book focuses on ex-servicemen and their families dealing with the aftermath of war and the changes that disrupt the traditional way of life. Little details from a hundred and more pages back, sometimes right from the beginning of the novel, come together in a single moment that explains whole lifetimes of disappointment and regret.It isn’t clear to us why his vehement rejection of his adoptive family is as strong as anything we see from Lenny, but it’s visceral. When he tries to scatter the ashes, Lenny attacks him and they fight for a long time while the others look on in amazement. George Webb, a divorced ex-cop and the narrator of this fine novel, works as a private investigator in London specializing in "matrimonial work": finding evidence of philandering. We know about that loan request from Vince, and now we hear about how Jack wanted Ray to be lucky for him just one more time.

Considered one of Swift's most important novels, the personal histories of Dobbs and his fellow travellers are gradually uncovered in the course of their journey from London to the coast. Soon he’s fighting everybody, even Sally one time when they were in the middle of a private little show-and-tell with their pants down. Adopted son of Jack and Amy Dodds, when his biological parents (the Pritchetts) were killed during the London Blitz. On the surface a simple tale of an increasingly bizarre day’s outing, this Booker-prize winning, internationally acclaimed novel is a resonant and classic exploration of the complexity and courage of ordinary lives. Amy, Jack's widow, does not accompany the men; she chooses instead to visit her and Jack's profoundly handicapped daughter in an institution, as she has done twice a week for 50 years.It was in her story (or, more aptly, lack of) that I remembered what I’d found most intriguing about Swift’s writing and philosophy. The two acquired the film rights to the book, and Schepisi begin to work on his adaptation, completing the first draft of the script by February 1998.