Hauling Jack’s Ashes : FICTION : LAST ORDERS.<i> By Graham Swift (Alfred A. Knopf: $23, 295 pp.)</i>

“Last Orders” is a novel made out of a half-dozen lives, and each of these lives is made out of hard facts. It’s a story about hard-lot people with little formal learning who must suddenly consider their lives and find what consolation they can.

All the characters live in Bermondsey, a small working-class section of London tucked into a loop of the Thames. They are uneducated but intelligent and eloquent people.

Bermondsey was badly bombed during World War II, and the entire action of the novel takes place on a single day 40 years after the war. Jack, a butcher, is dead, and three of his mates are carrying his ashes to Margate, a small resort town near the mouth of the Thames.

It was Jack’s last wish that he be scattered into the sea. Vince, his adopted son, is driving the men. Jack’s wife doesn’t go, instead visiting her brain-damaged daughter as she has faithfully and hopelessly done for years. The girl has never recognized her mother, and her father chose never to see or even speak of her once she was institutionalized.

Jack, a butcher, would have liked to have been a doctor. Ray, the insurance clerk, wanted to be a jockey. Lenny, the greengrocer, dreamed of being a prize-fighter. Only Vic, the undertaker, is happy in his work and with his two sons. No one else in the group takes much joy in their children. Indeed, Vince impregnated Lenny’s daughter, who ended up a whore. Then he married another woman and fathered a daughter, who also became a prostitute.

All these facts and more turn up bit by bit in short recollections by each of the major characters. The car ride is punctuated by stops at a pub, a war memorial, Canterbury cathedral, a sheep pasture and finally Margate, where, in a gale-force rain storm, the men scatter Jack’s ashes into the waves.

This synopsis sounds grim, but there is a satisfaction, even a splendor, in this group portrait. Swift’s characters are tough; they need to be, because for them the Blitz didn’t end in 1945. There were plenty of hard knocks after the last buzz bomb.

Apart from the younger, slippery Vince, the men have a bone-hard comradeship. They aren’t easy with each other. Their language doesn’t express affection or pleasure in any but the most guarded or understated way. Nevertheless they feel each other as immediate parts of their lives.

That the author conveys such characters in their slangy, scrappy Bermondsey speech is a terrific accomplishment. I may not have caught every nuance with my American ear. I wish I could hear it aloud; this novel would be a wonderful book on tape with each character played by a different actor. While I had to look up a dozen words in a slang dictionary, it’s possible to read this novel and guess the odd word: Toe-rag (beggar), knocking shop (whorehouse), gee-gee (horse), clobber (clothes), oggin or ogwash (sea), dosh (money) and chuff (impudent or happy).

You might think that letting these characters natter on would make for a diffuse novel with narratives meandering in six directions. But there are centripetal forces at work in “Last Orders” that prevent this. The first is the author’s wonderfully invisible hand, dove-tailing these first-person narratives into each other. The other organizing force is the characters: As they remember Jack’s life, they can’t help but recall and summarize their own.

Here is Lenny Tate, once-aspiring boxer, now an aging green grocer, remembering the fight that set a limit to his hope:

“I thought this one’s going to be a cinch, two rounds if that. Gunner Tate. Later on it became just a name that stuck: Gunner Tate, middle weight. Always pissed, always late. I came forward and he hung back, skipping round me, and I thought, ‘You ain’t been nowhere, sunshine, and ain’t going nowhere. You ain’t dragged five-fives through Libya, Sicily, all over sunny-grunny Italy. You don’t deserve nothing but I do.’ I saw his face. . . . Then I saw his glove where his face had been. And then I didn’t see nothing, nothing at all.”

I loved “Waterland,” Swift’s best-known earlier work. It had a bright, extravagant and even high-handed narrative breadth. “Last Orders” is a much more compressed book; its characters are as tightly packed and interlocked as warriors in a Japanese print of a battle scene or the jumble of naked bodies in Michelangelo’s “Last Judgment.”

Swift’s achievement here is what Frank O’Connor said should be the purpose of the short story: To give voice to members of a submerged population. The author has done this on the larger scale of a novel and without condescension. His characters are not “mute Miltons” but speakers of their own lives--as clearly and fully as if the reader were one of them.