Book Reviews - Review 70

Another very good effort from one of England's most consistent and conscientious novelists. The Light of Day follows a day in the life of private detective George Webb as he visits Sarah Nash, a former client with whom he has fallen in love, in prison. He 'calls in' on the grave of her ex-husband on the way. While he does these things he reflects on the bizarre twist his life has taken, and recalls the events that led him and Sarah to their current unenviable predicament.

Swift employs his usual technique of telling several stories simultaneously, each of which takes place at a different period in the past, but all of them crucial in having brought the narrator to his current situation. Swift's extravagant use of flashbacks starts out by being rather wearing, but gradually builds up a very effective head of suspense as factual details are filled in and the portrayal of the characters' emotional worlds deepens.

The Light of Day is written in a very plain style - even plainer than Last Orders, which at least could employ working-class vernacular to add colour to the narrative. It is always difficult for a novelist to make a first-person narrator sound like anything other than a novelist; after all, how can you write a good novel without writing 'good' prose? Only an extremely subtle application of craftsmanship can overcome this self-imposed handicap, persuading the reader of extraordinary depths beneath an ordinary surface texture. And does Swift succeed? On the whole, I think he does, even if the barrages of staccato verbless sentences sometimes sound rather too convincingly like the amateurish fumblings of a half-educated ex-cop struggling to express himself artistically; and even if, conversely, the touches of sharp lyricism and astute psychological analysis sound rather too much like a first-rank novelist indulging his artistic gifts at the expense of strict realism.

So it's not 100% successful, and probably never could be; but The Light of Day is undeniably a beautifully conceived novel. And its real centre of interest is not, in any case, the grey character of Webb himself, but rather the account of the sudden, unexpected breakdown of Sarah Nash's happy marriage when she and her husband take in a female refugee from Croatia. I've read few novels that capture so convincingly how stable relationships that seemed set to last for life can collapse overnight.