- Hardcover: 256 pages
- Publisher: Hamish Hamilton; First American Edition edition (27 Feb 2003)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0241142040
- ISBN-13: 978-0241142042
- Product Dimensions: 23 x 15.2 x 2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 674,643 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
Graham Swift's keenly awaited novel, Light of Day, his first since the Booker Prize-winning Last Orders of 1997, is a kind of murder mystery. There is a detective, and there is a death at the heart of the story. Yet the death, as Light of Day begins, is two years in the past; and the detective, the sole narrator of this elusive tale, does no recognisable detecting. Over the course of a single November day, he visits a crematorium to leave flowers on the grave of the victim; later he enters the seclusion in which the person who caused that death lives. The detective is George Webb, once a policeman but now a "disgraced" private investigator with a penchant for cooking (learned, it would seem, from the River Café books). The dead man is Bob Nash, a gynaecologist, the killer his wife Sarah, a language teacher; the inevitable other corner of the triangle, and the catalyst of the two-year-old drama, is Kristina, a Croatian refugee to whom they have kindly offered shelter. The mystery into which George penetrates, speculatively, circumspectly, as he goes about his day, is not about who wielded the weapon--that's clear almost from the start--but why. For, although George's is the witnessing eye, he was merely an observer of the unfolding of the eternal triangle--at first dispassionate, then concerned, then horrified. He is no omniscient narrator: there are actions and motives that will always remain obscure, at least to George. Like life, really.
Swift is an extraordinarily parsimonious novelist: plot and language are spare to the point of dullness; and he sets Light of Day almost entirely in a tightly bound and vividly rendered corner of South-West London encompassing Wimbledon and its environs. Yet the careful repetitions and hesitations, as George gropes his way towards the meaning of the fateful act, mirrored in his slow progress from Wimbledon Broadway across the Common to Putney Vale and its crematorium, give this apparently slight story considerable cumulative power. And at the centre of all the unfolding intricacies, as George turns his thoughts from the past to the future, is the bright, clear hope of freedom and love embodied in the novel's title. --Robin Davidson
Review
'Book for book, Swift is surely one of England's finest novelists' John Banville
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
As he did in 'Waterland,' in 'The Light of Day' Graham Swift breathes new life into a long-established genre. There it was the family saga; here it's the detective novel. 'The Light of Day' has most of the familiar noir elements: the disgraced ex-cop turned private eye, the long-suffering secretary, the beautiful client turned murderess, her unfaithful husband. But Swift transcendes the cliches (while having a little fun with them) and, establishing whodunit early, focuses on the inside of his characters--particularly the private investigator/narrator, George Webb. I went from the final page immediately back to the first, knowing that like Swift's other novels 'The Light of Day' will reward multiple readings.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Based on his sex previous novels, my judgement would be that Graham Swift is the greatest English novelist of his time. Faced with The Light of Day, however, I cannot help feeling that something has gone wrong. I find myself continually wanting to edit the text. While some phrasings are, as is usual with Swift, minor miracles of language, others are criminally flat. Granted, Swift is giving voice to a man whose field has never been eloquence, and so the awkwardness of the narrator's language is in accordance with the dictates of realism. However, this awkwardness sits uneasily with George Webb's poetic abilities elsewhere. The result is that the novel seems to me aesthetically skewed. A related problem with the novel is that we only get to hear George's voice, his version of events, and to me his side of the story seems to be the least interesting one. If Swift had adopted the polyphonic narration of Last Orders, letting us hear the perspectives of Sarah, her dead husband, his mistress, and perhaps George's daughter, the novel would have been both more immediately gripping and more thematically rewarding. Having said this, I do agree that once I finished the novel I wanted to start over. Perhaps what I have identified as problems with this novel are only parts of a subtlety that pays off with repeated readings. Swift still has that remarkable skill.
13 of 15 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Graham Swift's The Light of Day is a dazzling meditation on love and murder, presented almost as a prose poem with its luscioius repetition of phrases and themes to do with what was and is and might-have-been, secrecy and the effects of meetings and actions, and more. Every word feels like the right one. In all my life of reading, I don't remember ever before turning from the last page of a novel directly to the first to savor the prose again. So many of these phrases lend the ring of truth to much of what the protagonist feels--it is easy to identify with him and feel with him the ups and downs of everything from secret knowledge to feelings of fatherhood and much more. Like all of Swift's books, this one is memorable and to be thoroughly enjoyed.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
truly awful
I hadn't read any graham swift before and I won't be reading any of his work again.
This book was truly awful with the most irritating writing style I have ever come... Read more
This book was truly awful with the most irritating writing style I have ever come... Read more
Published 8 months ago by kooky ju
"To love is to be ready to lose, it's not to have, to keep."
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... Read more
Published on 24 Aug 2003 by Mary Whipple
AN IMPORTANT BOOK
Not only an important book, The Light Of Day is an important work of art. Booker Prize winner Graham Swift skillfully paints his protagonist's past and hoped for future within the... Read more
Published on 14 Aug 2003 by Gail Cooke
The light of life
One cannot fail to enjoy and admire any Swift book. It's England and it's English and it has a rugged poetry of realism. Read more
Published on 13 Jun 2003 by mfl
A refugee in your own life.
"Light of Day" is a very intense novel, as Swift concentrates on the point of view of one man, George, the private eye, whereas in "Last Orders" there were still four major... Read more
Published on 17 Mar 2003 by Jean-Marc Lantz
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