[In the following review, Hutchings offers a mixed assessment of Sillitoe's Last Loves, contending that the novel lacks the “complexity and mythical resonance” of earlier works.]

Exactly forty years after their military stint in Malaya, George Rhoads and Bernard Missenden, lifelong friends who are the protagonists of Alan Sillitoe's Last Loves, return together to now-independent Malaysia on what is （at least initially） a sentimental journey, “a nostalgia tour to find out whether or not those faded black-and-white photographs stuck in the disintegrating sellotaped [sic] albums had any meaning.” Though their quest for such insight and personal validation is initially thwarted in the nation's much-changed cities, where few vestiges of places they remember still remain, they realize that they must ultimately return to the islands' primordial jungle, the site of the most dangerous moments of their military career, a locale that has been virtually unaffected by the intervening years.

For Sillitoe too, their journey constitutes a literary “return”: the Malayan jungle （the site of his own military service from 1947 to 1949） has figured repeatedly throughout his fiction, both as a literal setting and as a recurrent metaphor. The most autobiographical of Sillitoe's early novels, Key to the Door （1960）, reaches its climax in that jungle—an existentially self-defining moment when its protagonist Brian Seaton must decide whether to kill a Malay insurgent, an “enemy” with whose cause he secretly sympathizes; his arduous ascent of the jungle-laden mountain known as Gunong Barat is equally an attempt to penetrate the complexities of his mind and soul. The jungle entanglements encountered in Sillitoe's work are thus not only physical but metaphysical as well. Even his characters who have never left England's industrial cities repeatedly characterize their world in “jungle” terms of essentially amoral struggle and strife: Arthur Seaton, for example, the factory-working （anti）hero of Sillitoe's first novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning （1958）, insists, “It's a good [but also a hard] life if you don't weaken,” a concise summary of the modern urban jungle's social Darwinist code.

Nevertheless, it is in the literal jungle of Malaysia that the long-standing friendship of George and Bernard receives its ultimate test, that painful truths are unexpectedly realized, that new insights and fulfillment are finally and fatally achieved. Self-described as formerly the “craziest bastards in the platoon,” they indulge occasionally in the kind of antic disruptiveness for which Sillitoe's protagonists are renowned, though they do so primarily to prove themselves capable of being still rowdy after all these years. They are accompanied on their journey by a woman named Gloria, who has traveled from England to Malaysia to learn more about her father's life there as a prison administrator during the war; she is the most insightfully developed female character in Sillitoe's fiction since Pam Hargreaves, the protagonist of Her Victory （1982）.

With the rather somber retrospectiveness that first appeared in Sillitoe's fiction in The Widower's Son （1976）, Last Loves deftly and sympathetically depicts his characters' relatively mundane domestic lives as well as their search for a meaningful past; however, it lacks the complexity and mythic resonance of The Storyteller （1979） and The Lost Flying Boat （1983）, individual novels from his later career that seem more likely to endure.