”The Light of Day" by Graham Swift - review

 “The Light of Day” by Graham Swift:

This is my second book by Graham Swift, well, actually the third, if you count 100 pages into his Ever After, which I laid aside for this one, The Light of Day.

As in Mothering Sunday, which I thought was a stunning little masterpiece, the events revolve around one single event which dramatically altered the lives of everyone.

We meet George Webb, a former policeman and now private detective who is on his way to visit a former client in prison, the woman for whom and in consequence for everyone, life turned bitterly and dramatically in a very unprecedented way. Two years before George Webb had an assignment to follow her strayed husband and his mistress, a routine job which catastrophically went awry and left everyone, including the detective, transformed for ever.

This could be at first glance a simple detective story but it is not. There is a building of suspense but it is towards an end we already know about. Much more it is about looking back on lives led, on decisions once made and on the possibilities of missed chances and how a life might have turned in a different direction.

In exploring his past George Webb finds himself on a path to self-discovery and love. This is maybe the true message of the book and a token of hope, that regardless of how late in life and regardless of how many wrong decisions we made and stray paths we walked, there lies still hope.

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