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Ray has his own way with words: when I started to read the opening chapter, which he narrates, I thought Swift hadn’t quite pitched it right because among the non-Standard English phrases come apt little descriptions, almost (but not quite) self-conscious. It’s Ray holding the jar—or ‘holding Jack’ as they’ve come to refer to it in these later chapters—and by the time they’ve struggled through the rain that’s just arrived, he’s feeling good about it. He got nowhere in the boxing ring and never managed to get away from the hand-to-mouth existence of running a fruit and veg stall. Each of them, it turns out, has a guilty secret, and the ironies compound as the quiet dramas of their lives are revealed. It’s in such characters (like Waterland’s Dick) that the petty foibles of the more “mundane” characters around them are exposed, powerfully and cleverly.

We can’t know precisely how angry she is when she comes home to find out not only of the possibility of the move to Australia, but that it’s more or less an agreed fact. This experience is making everybody ask the big questions, however they might be moderated by blokeish asides. 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. But my novel can’t just be about a small corner of England or about Margate, because in the 25 years since it was published it has been translated into many languages and people from all over the world have written to me after reading it to say, in their own way, “I’ve been there too. But it must have contributed to the deep rift between him and Carol, and we don’t know what else there’s been.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. There is little of the strange magic that makes Swift's novel Waterland so remarkable, with its wonderful atmospherics and frequently lurid tales of eels, incest and ale.

These men are at the end of their working lives, and Jack’s death has forced them to think about their own mortality. How was he to know the value of the place would skyrocket after he’s sold it too cheap in the first place? 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. She is able to give us a lot of insights into how Jack picked her up at Billingsgate, how ambiguous it is whether he fancied her, as she believed, or was just looking for another daughter-substitute as Vince thinks.

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. What happens to your expectation of the traditional "exposition"-being filled in, at the outset of a novel, on setting, character, and what has happened before?

The sense of hidden truth – of repressions and cover-ups and gradual revelation – makes the book not only gripping in an understated way, but also emotionally satisfying. A large part of my latest novel, Here We Are, is set not just in Brighton, but in a theatre on Brighton Pier. It’s only after the fight, and after he’s scattered a token handful, that we see how deep this goes with Vince. If Vince and Lenny are the most unhappy characters in the novel, why do you think they’ve become this way? When he tries to scatter the ashes, Lenny attacks him and they fight for a long time while the others look on in amazement.Jack borrowed money from Vince and gave it to Ray, asking him to gamble it for him and give the winnings to Amy. In June 1996, Swift declared that it was a homage to Faulkner's book but there were various differences. Amy had emotionally detached herself from her husband, because he told her that he wanted them both to abandon their retarded daughter. And it's that, rather than any nonsense about plagiarism, that makes it seem a relatively weak Booker prize winner – and far from Swift's best work.