Rating: 
Summary: Bob and Carol and George and Rita and Frank and . . .
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: An Engaging Story of Love and Loss, Betrayal and Redemption
Review: 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.
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