Graham Swift: The Light Of Day

Reviewed by JENNY JONES*

In Graham Swift's seventh novel he has found his perfect narrator: someone whose job is to use his eyes and brain to find out about people - a private detective. Through the eyes of George Webb we see ordinary objects - cafes, coats, smiles, knees, houses at night - with peculiar intensity. We are offered an alternative view.

As George Webb sits in his office above a tanning centre and takes up the task of spying on another erring spouse, he imagines how his client might see him. Gauging her (they're mostly female) symptoms he could be a doctor, noting the facts with his fountain pen he could be a solicitor; listening to the rehearsed lines he could be a casting director.

Looking across the street, he sees the florist opening up and considers: how come flower shops still exist? He knows why. The biggest reason is for conscience, as the florist next door to his wayward father's photographic studio used to say.

The conscience of George Webb, disgraced policeman now in "the matrimonial business", is a painfully active one. If he had acted more decisively on a certain night someone might be alive now instead of dead, and Sarah Nash, the woman George loves, might not be in prison but home with her erring husband. Sometimes George feels as if he's the only one on watch, "as if I'd personally put the world to bed and it wouldn't see another day if it weren't for me".

But The Light of Day is far more than a wringing of hands and a string of "if onlys". It examines how people can act in a way even they could not foresee. It explores the human need for excitement and risk, the element of chance. It shows how people often must act in a context without rules, or where the rules are inadequate to guide their behaviour.

Less obviously about "ordinary" people than Swift's previous novel and now successful film, Last Orders, Light of Day nonetheless has everything readers have come to expect of a Swift novel: distinct narrative voice, continuous interplay of ideas, past and present treated as nectar outside time's hierarchy, and above all an intense concern with the question of how to live. Swift's approach is nothing if not complex, yet we are rarely confused, often moved and never bored. There's just too much at stake.

The story with its many strands of subplot unfolds like a suspense novel. We are kept in the dark until Swift's time-frame grants us light, but find so much treasure on the way we hardly notice how many pages pass before we fall upon a scene that partially explains the mystery created several chapters ago.

Through repeating simple words and phrases, applied first with one meaning and then another, first in the context of one character, then in that of another, Swift's story builds an intense hypnotic power, plausibly masterminded by George.

In his musings about how the people in his life see him, we gain insight into them. When he cannot watch them, his imagination fills the void. The build-up to the poignant murder scene is handled in this way.

George's determination to visit Sarah Nash in prison for the length of her term seems to his assistant Rita like a battening down of life. But in accepting Sarah's request for him to be her eyes, record the world for her, George has found new eyes. He's on a journey that could hardly be richer.

Penguin Books, $34.95

* Jenny Jones is an Auckland writer.