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It’s the meanest metaphor imaginable for the lessons not learnt and a life spent trying, and failing, to simply keep afloat. Why does Vince, against the wishes of the others, scatter some of the ashes over the hill at Wick’s Farm? However the nickname was originally given to him during his years in the African desert during the Second World War, when luck was needed to survive in one piece. He must be a bright bloke, although he doubts it, attributing his brainy reputation to his own father’s misplaced faith in his cleverness.

This is what Vince had once proudly announced to Mandy to be the Garden of England, and it goes back to stories Jack used to tell about hop-picking. Then we’re in the final chapter, Margate, and it’s only when they’re on the pier that Ray decides to give Vince his money back. I throw the last handful … and I hold up the jar, shaking it, like I should chuck it out to sea too, a message in a bottle, Jack Arthur Dodds, save our souls, 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. Ray knew that Jack refused to visit his daughter, June in the institution and started giving Amy a ride in his camper van.Swift plumbs the existentialist questions of identity and the meaning of existence while remaining true to the vocabulary, social circumstances and point of view of his proletarian characters. So many half-baked ideas have unexpected consequences, and the upshot of this, eventually, is that Mandy goes to the camper-van, ostensibly to thank Vince. Amy has paid her dues to both Jack and June, not that she puts it like that, and Ray reminds us how he had wanted her since before he met her.

The author gently reveals such personal details about so many lives, all on a simple trip to Margate. And he never talks about those sons of his, the ones—if I’m remembering this right from early in the novel—who work in the business now like Vince never did in Jack’s.It’s the blokeishness of an older generation—Swift must have been about Vince’s age when he wrote this, not that of the older characters—and it’s one of them, Ray, who holds the thread of the day’s journey. Besides, imitation is flattery; the very fact that Frow picked up on the similarities shows how well it was working as homage.

They all seem awed by how things are turning out, and someone remarks how respectful to Jack it is to bring his ashes here. It contributes to his aggressive reputation in the playground, based on his reaction to taunts that he isn’t really Jack and Amy’s son. I admire Faulkner very much, and there are obvious similarities between the narrative – although I have my jar of ashes, Faulkner has his rotting corpse, and the setting is clearly very different. 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. An hilarious account of the posthumous journey of a London butcher's mortal remains en route for Margate Pier, and the friends who provided the cortège.The novel concerns a car journey by a quartet of Londoners to carry out the last request of Jack Dodds: to have his ashes scattered into the sea from Margate pier. 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. 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. The fact that they stop at Canterbury Cathedral reminds us that in his Canterbury Tales Chaucer, too, chose to have his pilgrims tell stories and talk about themselves as they made their way along the road to Canterbury.