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George Webb -- for the entire book, and it proves to be a highly claustrophobic place to be. Worse, he allows George to natter on at needless length about his hopes and doubts, turning what might have been a slender, elegant book into a puffy, self-important volume" and concludes in wishing the novel "were a good 40 pages shorter".
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is also critical: "It is difficult to reconcile the fact of so much writerly achievement with the feeling that the novel is somewhat underpowered" and that the author "has become a master of word-paring, phrase-clipping and scene-whittling, and the austerity of his style feels like a perfect fit with
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is more critical, however: "The book is meticulously crafted, deftly moving back and forth in time to build suspense, but there is something lugubrious and solipsistic about its delivery. Mr. Swift puts us in the head of his narrator -- a downtrodden
British private eye and disgraced former cop named
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on the two year anniversary of his death, and then to visit Sarah who was convicted of his murder and with whom George has fallen in love. George recounts his involvement in the crime, employed by Sarah as a private investigator to ensure that Bob's affair with
Kristina, a Croatian refugee, had come
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praises the novel as having 'a brilliantly slow, precise, careful structure, covering "every hour, every minute, every detail" of its case with as much control as it lays out its geography and deals with its parts of speech. Within this tight little map, the story it has to tell is wildly extreme,
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is as close to seeming spoken as any novel I have read. It dares the ordinariness of flat, repetitious, unliterate narration... Swift’s dare is worth the risks, however. The book’s pleasures, slowly coddled, take time to mature, but in the process they teach you the art of reading slowly and
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the voice of his laconic detective. Yet in cleaving to this scrupulous technique, he has skimped on the more obvious satisfactions of excitement and suspense. The pages turn, but the pulse never quickens."
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carefully, of maturing with the story... Out of this apparently limited material and apparently limited style, Swift coaxes a novel of solemn depths."
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saying on the consensus "No consensus -- and lots and lots of comparisons to his earlier novels". The novel divided opinion:
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The book is set in 1997 in
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BBC NEWS | Programmes | Newsnight | Review | Graham Swift's The Light Of Day
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was generally well-received among
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178:sensational and romantic.'
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236:Retrieved 2015-11-11.
592:Novels set in London
462:The Sweet-Shop Owner
249:How’s the Empress?,
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143:Putney Vale Cemetery
607:Fiction set in 1997
597:2003 British novels
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270:The Daily Telegraph
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542:Here We Are
502:Last Orders
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171:writing in
146:to an end.
130:Last Orders
586:Categories
494:Ever After
221:References
182:James Wood
478:Waterland
445:Works by
302:4 October
150:Reception
57:Publisher
518:Tomorrow
49:Language
276:19 July
184:in the
127:winner
52:English
572:(2014)
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Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. Additional terms may apply.
