On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan  (101)
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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.
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
Graham Swift is one of Britain's most exciting and widely respected novelists. Born in 1949, his earlier works aroused considerable interest, but it was not until the 1983 publication of Waterland, which won both the Guardian Fiction Prize and a Booker nomination, that his talent was fully recognized. He went on to win the Booker in 1996 with Last Orders, and this latest novel has been eagerly awaited. And Swift does not disappoint. This is an intensely moving love story in which he looks at the eternal issues of jealousy and betrayal with new eyes. He examines the tyranny of love, the impossibility of lovers disentangling themselves from its snares, the way time holds out the hope of redemption, but at a dreadful price. Sarah Nash is serving a prison sentence for murdering her husband. She passes the long hours working on a translation about the life of Napoleon III and his wife Eugenie, seeing no one apart from George, who visits regularly as clockwork every fortnight. George is a private detective; when Sarah suspected her husband Robert was having an affair with their beautiful young Croatian lodger, she called George in to investigate. Moving fluidly between their conversations in prison, and events as they happened during the investigation years earlier, Swift dexterously peels back the layers of guilt and deception, to reveal painful truths buried in the pasts of everyone concerned. George follows the lovers, waiting outside their Fulham rendezvous and watching them prepare to say goodbye for ever as Kristina returns to her homeland. His brief is simple - to ensure that Kristina boards the plane alone and that Robert returns to the family home to pick up the shattered remains of his former existence with his wife. But Swift's characters are creatures of great complexity and unpredictability, and Sarah is no exception. Tragedy unfolds before George's eyes in the Nashs' luxurious Wimbledon home, with the scent of coq au vin lingering in the air. The Light of Day combines the suspense of a first-class crime novel and a compelling love story to produce a work of rare power and insight. (Kirkus UK)
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