Rating: 
Summary: Reflecting on the past
Review: "The Light of Day" is a finely-crafted piece of fiction from Graham Swift, whose writing style it seems to me has become increasingly spare, yet nonetheless effective for that. His sentences have become short, giving his prose an almost staccato effect, yet the control and skill evidenced in his earlier writing is still there."The Light of Day" is a melancholy, reflective work - again, this seems to have become Swift's forte. Present dilemmas cause his characters to reflect upon the trials and tribulations of their pasts. It seems to me that for Swift, we carry our formative years (indeed all of our experiences) aorund with us. We interpret and react to the present in a large part by referring to our past in trying to interpret what's happening now. In a large part, we are products of our past. Thus, in "The Light of Day", George Webb the ex-policeman (now private eye) becomes increasingly emotionally involved with his new client Sarah Nash, whose husband Robert is having an affair with the Croatian student Kristina Lazic. As George follows Robert around, he becomes fascinated with the Nash's private life, indeed he becomes infatuated with Sarah. The emotional turmoil this causes him sets his mind off exploring other times in his life when he was under emotional stress: his relationship with his father; the loss of his job; the breakup of his marriage; and his relationship with his daughter. George's past comes back - not quite to haunt him, but almost as an automatic reaction to his present. An expertly crafted and involving novel. G Rodgers
Rating:
Summary: swift is back
Review: After waiting seven years from his Booker prize-winning novel, Last Orders, we finally have Swift's latest work. I am reduced to a cliche': it is worth the wait. The Light of Day is a beautiful meditation on time (not an unfamiliar theme with Swift) and the inability to understand our choices and what we are really capable of.
George's narrative is Faulknerian with its weaving in and out of the present. And, like Faulkner, Swift brings in so much of the past that corresponds to the present. In fact, the present and the past (all of the way back to Napoleon III) blend together in a wonderful collage of "the things we do for love."
For some, the first 50 pages or so may seem confusing. All I can say is, Stick with it. The more you read, the more you will understand. You may not come up with "an answer," but you will gain an understanding of the mystery, even the absurdity, of our decisions.
Swift is, in my opinion, the greatest living writer. No other author brings a mix between narrative complexity (pretty common) and great story telling (too uncommon) to one novel.
Put Dickens, Faulkner and Proust into a bowl and mix them. You will find Graham Swift.
Perhaps Waterland or Everafter is a better place to start. Regardless, all of his works challenge the reader to understand how the past and the present are intertwined together. The past is like a ghost that haunts all of our decisions, all of our actions, and all of our memories.
Graham Swift delivers again (I only hope that we won't have to wait seven years for another brilliant novel).
Rating: 
Summary: Fate Rules, OK?
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Fate Rules, OK?
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Stylistic and touching
Review: Graham Swift has crafted a special novel. It seemed as if each word was carefully selected and each sentence is special so as to slowly develop a theme through careful repetition and enhancement. The unveiling of the narrative was rather like a modern film such as "21 grams". I wasn't ready for it to end.
Rating: 
Summary: Implausible and Disappointing
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: Good, but not great
Review: I think Swift was striving for something subconscious and suffocating with this story, and he accomplished this to a degree, yet I did not feel any great level of empathy or identification with the main characters.
Having said that, it was written in a particularly stylish way, employing short, punchy chapters, mostly operating within the mind of George Webb, private eye, who is drawn into an area of grey that is an extension of what his profession is intrinsically concerned with. There are no "happy" endings in his line of work, which consists mostly of spying on infidels, mostly husbands, cheating on their wives. He crosses the line with a client in an emotional way, and much of the story is spent in flashbacks, and then back to George waiting, waiting, interminably, for his love, the object of his obsession, to be free to be his. There is quite a bit of dramatic build-up and suspense, even though we know the gist of what is going to happen. This was done well, although parts of the book tended to be somewhat repetitive and slow.
This was my first Swift novel, and I will seek out more, as I suspect this was not his high point, although it was a completely satisfactory and engaging story.
Rating:
Summary: Swiftly disappointed
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: "To love is to be ready to lose, it¿s not to have, to keep."
Review: 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
Rating:
Summary: Unusual and Satisfying Book
Review: It's tough to get into the rhythm of this book at first, but once you do, you'll be engrossed in the narrator and his story. The storytelling is almost stream-of-consciousness in its style. I was expecting a thriller. It's not. But the writing is so interesting in the way the writer lets bits and pieces of the story seep out and lets you (the reader) put it all together. A good book with some fantastic characters.
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