Graham Swift is a writer who is held in very high regard by his peers. He was born on 4 May 1949 in London, educated at Dulwich College, London, Queens' College, Cambridge, and later the University of York.
Some of Swift's books have been filmed, including Waterland (1992), Shuttlecock (1993) and Last Orders (1996). His novel Last Orders was joint-winner of the 1996 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction and a mildly controversial winner of the 1996 Booker Prize, owing to the superficial similarities in plot to William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying.
The prize-winning Waterland is set in The Fens. A novel of landscape, history and family, it is often cited as one of the outstanding post-war British novels and has been a set text on the English literature syllabus in British schools.
Of The Light of Day Amazon says: On a cold but dazzling November morning George Webb, a former policeman turned private detective, prepares to visit Sarah, a prisoner and the woman he loves. As he goes about the business of the day he relives the catastrophic events of two years ago that have both bound them together and kept them apart.
Making atmospheric use of its suburban setting and shot through with a plain man’s unwitting poetry and rueful humour, The Light of Day is a powerful and moving tale of murder, redemption and of the discovery, for better or worse, of the hidden forces inside us.
Synopsis - contains spoilers!
George Webb's detective agency is run from an office above a tanning studio on Wimbledon Broadway. He's used to snooping: as a child, he spied on his father's adultery. His assistant, Rita, is also, occasionally, his mistress, and he hasn't missed his opportunities with some of his lady clients. No St George in shining armour, then, but a "corrupt" cop thrown out of the force for coercing a witness, his marriage a failure, his daughter only recently back in his life after a long estrangement. (He makes her nice dinners; he's a "cooking detective".) Sarah Nash, a language teacher and translator, enters his life, and changes it for ever, when she comes to ask him to spy on her husband. He's a gynaecologist who's been having an affair with a Croatian refugee they've taken in. The affair is over, Kristina is going back to her war-scarred country, but Sarah wants them followed to see if she really does get on the plane. Slowly, and, it seems, inexorably, this chain of events leads to a death. Now, two years on, George is putting flowers on a grave and visiting Sarah in prison.
What I thought:
Of this novel a Guardian reviewer wrote:
The Light of Day has a brilliantly slow, precise, careful structure,
covering "every hour, every minute, every detail" of its case with as
much control as it lays out its geography and deals with its parts of speech.
Within this tight little map, the story it has to tell is wildly extreme,
sensational and romantic: completely out of hand. Its characters "cross a
line" into savage places. In this banal surburbia, they "fall through
space"; in this quiet corner of the civilised world, there are no safe
houses.
The style of the writing gives the impression of spoken word. A stream of consciousness, the events that the novel describes being played and replayed in the narrator's head. The book is crafted in such a way that it moves back and forth in time to build suspense. It makes for open text on the page, deceptively accessible and an invitation to read at speed. But that would be to lose the sense of the rather flat and repetitious narration with spare use of vocabulary. I am not sure if this is a consequence but the reading of this novel had a lowering of mood as I followed the text and absorbed the story. Lugubrious is the word that springs to mind. The style does not suit everyone. One reviewer wrote:
"It is difficult to reconcile the fact of so much writerly achievement with the feeling that the novel is somewhat underpowered" and that the author "has become a master of word-paring, phrase-clipping and scene-whittling, and the austerity of his style feels like a perfect fit with the voice of his laconic detective. Yet in cleaving to this scrupulous technique, he has skimped on the more obvious satisfactions of excitement and suspense. The pages turn, but the pulse never quickens."
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