Customer Reviews

The Light of Day

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Initially resembling an old-fashioned, hard-boiled detective story, this novel by Graham Swift becomes, as the perspective widens, an investigation of love, man's need for love, and the sacrifices we are all willing to make for love. Private detective George Webb allows the reader to "tag along" during one day of his life in 1997, talking to his readers about aspects of his life as they impinge randomly on his consciousness. Description is not a big part of George's life, and it takes the reader some time to understand all his references in this lengthy interior monologue. We don't know, at first, why Nov. 20 is a significant date to him or where he goes every other Thursday, nor do we know about his personal relationships with the women introduced at the beginning, or the reason he's buying flowers, or why he's had a woman's handbag in his possession for two years.

As George's recollections, memories, and observations expand, however, we gradually come to know him and his past, including his relationship with his father, his own broken marriage and the circumstances surrounding it, his alienated daughter, his womanizing, the scandal which has resulted in his leaving the police force, and his decision to specialize in "matrimonial work." We learn, too, that George's client, Mrs. Nash, is now in jail, the reasons for this unfolding even more gradually, as we come to know her, her husband Bob, and the privileged life they've led. Always, however, our opinions of these characters and their relationships are colored by George's point of view, and we, as objective observers, learn as much about them from what George does not say as we do by what he does say.

All of George's memories are concerned with the vulnerability of people who are in love, as Swift raises questions about whether we choose the people we love, or whether we are chosen by them. Does love just happen? What makes it last? What happens to lovers who are "unchosen"? And can we love too much? Although a mystery story is not usually the framework for such a serious, philosophical analysis of love in all its permutations, Swift manages to make this work through his beautifully wrought character study of George, buffeted every which way by the loves in his life. In the lean, unemphatic prose style he first employed in Last Orders, Graham Swift presents a sensitive investigation of love with all its mysteries and ineffable sadness. Mary Whipple

Unfortunately, I was far less enamoured of The Light of Day than the four reviewers who have already posted. I love most of Graham Swift's novels: Last Orders, The Sweet Shop Owner, Waterland, etc. I was very excited to purchase and read TLOD. The experience was very disappointing. I wouldn't mind the narrowness of the book's temporal span (essentially, it follows the protagonist's emotions over the course of a single day, although memories and flashbacks reach back many years), were it not for the fact that I find the book's emotional and thematic range similarly limited. By the midway point of the book, Swift had pretty much covered the range of emotions experienced by George and exhausted the character's development. From a thematic and emotional standpoint, the rest of the book was mostly repetition of ground that already had been covered.
Also, the pseudo-detective story overlay for the novel wears thin quickly. Any real "suspense" dissipates quickly, leaving the gumshoe-as-metaphor-for-exploration-of-mysteries-of-the-heart concept a fairly intrusive and clunky affectation to drag through the remainder of the book.
This may have been a good idea for a long story or short novella, but it doesn't hold up for a whole novel. Frankly, I had to force myself to finish it, which is remarkably different from my experience with other of Swift's novels.

For some reason, a number of reviewers use the term "hard boiled" in their description of this deeply psychological novel. Presumably this is because the protagonist is an ex-policeman who was kicked off the force for "corruption" and is now doing seedy "matrimonial" detective work. And other familiar "hard boiled" types on hand as well: the efficient secretary who pines for the PI, the femme fatale client, a cheating husband, and the PI's long-gone ex-wife. While these are certainly well-established hard-boiled types, Swift is much more interested in noir than hard-boiled. Now "noir" is itself a very tricksy word in film and litcrit circles, with many and varied meanings. However, noir's main recurring theme is that of fate, and fate is what Swift is really interested in investigating in this novel. Another of noir's key themes is the individual's inability to escape the past, and this too, plays a major role.

The story takes place over the course of a day in the head of middle-aged George Webb, the aforementioned ex-cop turned private investigator. His interior monologue takes quite a while to get used to, lurching around in fits and starts, back and forth in time, with little glimpses here and there. This is a canny writing job of capturing the fractured nature of thought, which is rarely so kind as to adhere to complete direct syntaxóbut it also makes for jarring reading. The style only really works because it's a special day for Webb: the anniversary of the day a client killed her husband. Not just any client, but the client he's become completely obsessed with and visits every two weeks in jail.

Over the course of this emotionally distressing day, Webb's thoughts gradually reveal not only the story of his client's crime, but the story of his dismissal from the police, as well as his childhood, and his relationship with his daughter. Swift is careful to release only micrograms of information at a time, so that the complete portrait of Webb's life accumulates in fragments, like a pointillist painting gradually coming alive as the dots mount up. But for all this coyness, there's no real suspense in the narrative, events proceed along an inevitable track dictated by fate. It's heavily suggested early on that Webb was unjustly dismissed from the police, and it turns out he was. Webb's career in "matrimonial " detective work turns out to be linked to his childhood. Webb's obsession with his murderess client is based on... well... nothing really, it just inexplicably exists (as in a film noir). Ditto with any explanation for the client's crimeóit's just what fate had in store, and that's all there is to it. Ultimately, all of this is rather unsatisfying, if stylistically well-written. I've long wanted to read one of Swift's books, but this doesn't seem to be a good one to start with.

What to say about all these negative reviews ere I say anything about the book? Just this: If you don't love poetry, you WILL NOT like this book. Don't bother with it. Forget it exists. Expunge it from your mind. Swift invites these other sorts of readers and reviewers, I suppose, because, our main character - Indeed, the sole character through whose senses (all five, not merely sight) - George Webb, is a PI and there is a murder involved. So, let it be known, this novel is not about murder or detection (as the word is generally understood), but rather about language, love and life.

What Swift does here in this poetical novel is, to a great extent, an exploration of clichés, words and phrases we use every day and how TRUE to life they are. The two that come in for the most exploration by our narrator George are: 1.) He/She crossed a line 2.) Something came over him/her. This is most obvious when the murderess "crosses a line" after "something came over her," and she kills her husband. But in George's meditations, his memories tersely but poetically articulated here - One is reminded of nothing so much as Emily Dickinson - these phrases that we tritely throw around come to metaphorise what does indeed happen to us constantly. Reader, or potential reader, try thinking of one experience that is of significance to you, that happened to you or to someone you love. Got it? Now, take some time about this and ponder how much deliberate "choice" was involved or, by turn, how much something "came over one" and "somebody crossed a line." The more one meditates, like George, on his past and present, the more mysterious all life seems, the more fragile, the more out of our control.

The book is noirish, but in a much more profound way than is usually meant by the term. It introduces us to a liminal world into which we are certainly thrown without our choice at birth, in which the time of our departure is exceedingly uncertain and whose relatively short interim is marked by odd thresholds in time. Let's allow George to explain:

"She taught me to look at words. The way I think she once taught Kristina. Strange English words. Their shape, their trace, their scent. Dusk. Why is it so strangely thrilling - winter dusk? A curtain falling, a divide. As if we should be home now, safe behind doors. But we're not, it's not yet half-past four and everything becomes a mystery, an adventure. Now everything we do will be in the dark."

Swift's greatest work is, of course, Waterland, which remains unsurpassed as a single volume post-1950 British novel. His later works have not attained to this height of lyrical brilliance. But nor have those of any other British writer! The Light of Day is, however, in its lovely, tragic depiction of our fragile shimmering lives, the closest Swift has come to recapturing that glory.

This book is about style and the journey. It is about rehashing the past. It's about how we dwell on little things that done differently would have had huge impacts on our lives. It is not a mystery. It is not "hard boiled". It is obviously not what a number of reviewers were looking for when then started it. That doesn't mean it's not good. It just means they haven't separated the two.

It's true that the narrator seemingly falls for this woman without reason or explanation to the reader. One critic said this was hard to believe, that without enough this depth and explanation the whole premise to the story was flawed. But then isn't that exactly what guys do. Suddenly they are mad about someone for absolutely no reason. Just the right time or mood when they meet a woman, or a unexpected comment or smile. It's that easy.

The book is maybe a little long but it does feel like you've rehashed the incident as if it were your own. This is exactly what happens when people go down a road that makes them miserable but one that they feel stuck in. They spend ridiculous amounts of time going over and over the situation, with slightly different tangents each time.

Don't expect a plain Jane detective novel. Don't assume you know George because of what you read about him on the flyleaf and you may enjoy how the book says what it does.

Initially resembling an old-fashioned, hard-boiled detective story, this novel becomes, as the perspective widens, an investigation of love, man's need for love, and the sacrifices we are all willing to make for love. Private detective George Webb allows the reader to "tag along" during one day of his life in 1997, talking to his readers about aspects of his life as they impinge randomly on his consciousness. Description is not a big part of George's life, and it takes the reader some time to understand all his references in this lengthy interior monologue. We don't know, at first, why Nov. 20 is a significant date to him or where he goes every other Thursday, nor do we know about his personal relationships with the women introduced at the beginning, or the reason he's buying flowers, or why he's had a woman's handbag in his possession for two years.

As George's recollections, memories, and observations expand, however, we gradually come to know him and his past, including his relationship with his father, his own broken marriage and the circumstances surrounding it, his alienated daughter, his womanizing, the scandal which has resulted in his leaving the police force, and his decision to specialize in "matrimonial work." We learn, too, that George's client, Mrs. Nash, is now in jail, the reasons for this unfolding even more gradually, as we come to know her, her husband Bob, and the privileged life they've led. Always, however, our opinions of these characters and their relationships are colored by George's point of view, and we, as objective observers, learn as much about them from what George does not say as we do by what he does say.

All of George's memories are concerned with the vulnerability of people who are in love, as Swift raises questions about whether we choose the people we love, or whether we are chosen by them. Does love just happen? What makes it last? What happens to lovers who are "unchosen"? And can we love too much? Although a mystery story is not usually the framework for such a serious, philosophical analysis of love in all its permutations, Swift manages to make this work through his beautifully wrought character study of George, buffeted every which way by the loves in his life. In the lean, unemphatic prose style he first employed in Last Orders, Graham Swift presents a sensitive investigation of love with all its mysteries and ineffable sadness. Mary Whipple

If only because it is Graham Swift, I feel I have a right to be disappointed. After all, this is the Brit who gave us "Waterland" and "Last Orders," a writer has been compared to Dickens and Faulkner. That is not to say that there are not some good things about "Light of Day," his latest novel. The jokes may be a bit heavy-handed (a murderess is "dressed to kill"), but there is a residue of Swift's deadpan sense of humor. His hero is a divorced detective who has taken up cooking and who can't seem to help bedding his female clients, and then assimilating them into his life. As in his earlier, and far superior work, "Shuttlecock," the story is a mystery that doesn't get solved-it's not the who that's important, but the why. As in "The Sweet-Shop Owner" and "Waterland," a leading character is a woman whose behavior is indecipherable, particularly to the man who loves her, George Webb (great name for a private eye, by the way), the answers to whose questions must await his loved one's re-emergence from prison into "the light of day." But the elements don't add up to much here. The text is more like notes toward a novel, rather than the real thing itself. I wanted to know more about these people, not in the sense of learning their motivation, which is understandably opaque, especially in the case of something as outré as murder, but at least to the extent of seeing George in action with the object of his affection, Susan, on at least one occasion where he wasn't tongue-tied. This novel took Swift seven years to write. He has had bad patches before; between the marvels of "Waterland" and "Last Orders" came the disappointing "Out of This World" and "Ever After." But those were much more ambitious and therefore forgivable failures than "Light of Day," which, while continuing to explore Swift's favorite theme of qualified hope for the future, is tentative at best.

This book is about a detective. George. Written in the first person by him. He writes in sentences like this. Very short. To the point. His story is about a case of his. A woman. Sarah. Her husband was cheating on her. Bob. Sarah wants to know that the girl her husband cheated with--Katrina--is actually going away. So that she can love Bob again. Go back to normal. She asks George to follow them. To the airport.

This is the central plot of the story. But it takes a long time to get to it. The detective has a life, too. His wife, Rachel. He divorced her. Or rather, she divorced him. Because he used to be a cop. And got busted for corruption. She didn't like that. She left. Because of it.

So he follows them to the airport. I won't tell, what happens next. But there's a lot more to come first.

There's George's secretary. Rita. She loves him, too. After his divorce from Rachel. They live together. She doesn't like him seeing Sarah. She's a good secretary. Makes tea. Gets to the office early.

Bob likes Sarah. Likes her a lot. Talks to her about cooking. Buys her a glass of wine. Lots of names so far. Are you keeping track?

Katrina does what she must do. Leaves? Can't tell.

George's parents are in the story. His dad, Frank. His mom, Jane. Frank had an affair, too. Carol, the woman. George makes philosophical comments about it. Frank speaks her name on his deathbed. Jane feigns ignorance of the whole thing.

But the plot, the plot. Sarah and Bob. Well. Wait. A lot of commentary must be placed, first. Wise stuff. Witty stuff. Stuff only a detective, a man of the world, would know. Like about dead bodies. They have a heart. A stomach too. Important stuff. Literary stuff. Stuff apparently important enough to interrupt the plot every single time it finally seems like it's actually believe it or not going to go somewhere.

Sunlight on a knee. A cold November day. Dead men don't have a chance to speak. The screws don't take the time to say hello.

Very little dialogue. Very little dialogue in a plot that cries out for it. We get told it. We don't get to hear it. A lot of important stuff might be going on here. A lot.

But who knows? And frankly, who cares.

With THE LIGHT OF DAY, the Booker Prize-winning novelist Graham Swift has turned the classical mystery novel on its head. In place of the typical whodunit, he introduces a plot that centers around a private investigator, George Webb, and his more-than-passive involvement with a woman client who unexpectedly murders her unfaithful husband just as Webb has completed his assignment to observe the departure from London to Croatia of the "other woman."

THE LIGHT OF DAY is not a detective story - we know from the beginning who is killed, who did the killing, and the ostensible reason. Nothing is hidden from an investigative standpoint, but underneath those surface facts, almost everything is hidden, waiting to be discovered. Swift has written not so much a crime story as the story of a crime. It is an investigation of the lives and motivations of a small constellation of characters orbiting the fatal event: the cheating husband (Bob Nash), his betrayed wife (Sarah Nash), the young Croatian refugee (Katrina) with whom Bob has an affair, the private investigator (George Webb) Sarah hires to verify that Katrina boards the airplane for Switzerland, George's ex-wife (Rachel), his secretary and former client and one night fling (Rita), George's parents and his father's mistress, and the almost-retired police detective (Marsh) who investigates the Nash murder.

Swift guides us in his novel through George Webb's almost Kafkaesque transformation from physical and emotional detachment to an unrequited emotional attachment to Sarah as she serves her prison sentence for murder. George's bond with Sarah is as inescapable for him as Sarah's jail cell is for her, yet both find a sort of long-sought fulfillment in their mutual situation.

Graham Swift tells his story through jump cuts and time shifts among three major story lines: the events surrounding the murder itself, Marsh's investigation of George Webb's role in the murder, and George's fortnightly visit to Sarah in prison on the second anniversary of the murder. Interspersed are lesser threads detailing events surrounding the marital infidelity of George's father and the failed investigation by George into a near-murder by a man named Dyson, a failure that led to George's dismissal from the police force. The result is a fine weave in which each story line complements the others and fills out our understanding of George's character. We gradually come to see the reasons for George's seemingly inexplicable attachment to Sarah despite her crime.

While the main story line is motivated by a classic love triangle (Sarah, Bob, and Katrina) gone bad, the author fills his story with triangulated relationships: George, Sarah, and Rita; George, Marsh, and Dyson; George's father, mother, and Carol (the mistress); George, Sarah, and Bob; and Sarah, Napoleon III, and the Empress Eugenie. Each triangle plays out simultaneously as Swift cuts between scenes, building our appreciation of George Webb's character and his transformational relationship with Sarah.

Typical of mystery novels, THE LIGHT OF DAY employs short, choppy sentences to create a terse, almost noirish atmosphere. The prose is short on description and long on actions, but Swift's frequent use of rhetorical and hypothetical questions, seemingly addressed to the reader, creates a strong sense of introspection. In the end, we are, like George, left with many unanswered questions about how events such as these come to pass and why we cannot prevent them, only try to suffer through their consequences. As with Sarah and George, we each can hopefully survive our lives' tragedies and find our true place, leaving our fog of confusion and uncertainty and "step[ping] out at last into the clear light of day."

THE LIGHT OF DAY is a a winner, a cleverly-constructed and entertaining read, Ellery Queen with a literary bent. Fans of Paul Auster should particularly enjoy this book for its style, atmosphere, and structural execution.

Having recently read "Waterland" and "Last Orders"--both of which I found to be deeply moving--I was really looking forward to reading Swift's newest novel. Unfortunately, "The Light of Day" is not nearly in the same class as those other two. While I applaud the author for the attempt to stretch his work in a new direction, the gritty and hard-boiled world he tries to create here is just not believable. In particular, I found the main protagonist's (i.e., George, the defrocked cop turned private detective) obsession and devotion to his murderess client to be completely implausible. There really was nothing developed in the story about their relationship that justifies George's behavior, either during the book's catalyzing event or over the subsequent two years. Without even trying to establish why such passion and conviction might exist in the face of all reason, the novel came across to me as a soulless collection of literary devices.