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Jack borrowed money from Vince and gave it to Ray, asking him to gamble it for him and give the winnings to Amy.

If Vince and Lenny are the most unhappy characters in the novel, why do you think they’ve become this way? But the voices are nuanced enough for us to recognise differences, the care different characters take over how they describe things. Jack is present, corporeally speaking, in the jar of ashes as his friends take him down to the seaside. Amy visiting June religiously almost like a talisman but never getting anything she hopes for except perhaps to punish Jack and herself. Given that the narrative point of view is shifting and necessarily subjective, how does Graham Swift give Ray a different status from the other narrators?The south London vernacular falls naturally right from the start, and while "aint" rather than the more usual "ain't" seemed a bit unnecessary to start with, in the end because it is a word used so often by all of them it starts to flow and indeed flows better on the page uninterrupted by an apostrophe. 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. Inevitably, this journey is probably more about the past than the present, and the mixture of these make the dynamics of these interactions more complicated with every chapter. Neil Smith of the BBC said "The plot may be on the mawkish side, but that doesn't stop Fred Schepisi's adaptation .

The Guardian and TLS hailed it as Swift's finest book to date; it won the 1996 Booker Prize; it is included in the critic John Carey's list of the fifty most enjoyable books of the 20th century. Ray, having been with him in the war, knows a lot about how he had enough about him to have made his own decisions about who he wanted to be… but he became his father’s son anyway.Four men take the ashes of a friend, Jack Dodds, to Margate, to scatter them off the end of the pier. We only have Ray’s memory of it, but we can imagine how Carol feels that she’s the one who knows how her daughter operates.

They’ve noticed ever since the naval memorial at Chatham that they have things to talk about… which they don’t do, in fact. Through frequent flashbacks that stretch across six decades, the stories of the events that brought these people to this point in their lives slowly unfold, ultimately revealing the importance of friendship and love.Amy is on a journey of her own to visit their daughter, June (Laura Morelli), who has learning difficulties and was institutionalized shortly after her birth fifty years earlier. 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. WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 1996 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.