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

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).

"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

Willy Chapman is "The Sweet Shop Owner" in Graham Swift's carefully crafted novel. The book chronicles the events of a single day in Willie's life as he goes about the same routine he has established and maintained for almost 40 years. As Willie performs the mundane tasks of opening his shop, stacking newspapers, and selling ice cream, he reminisces about his life. We see a man who has become his job by suppressing his personal desires and emotions. He functions and operates for others--his fragile wife, Helen (who suffers from psychosomatic asthma)--his selfish daughter, Dorrie (who is ashamed of her working class roots and can't wait for her parents to die)--and the customers Willie serves who perhaps have a greater excuse for objectifying Chapman and labelling him as a money-driven shopkeeper "that cardboard cut-out behind the counter."

But Willie is far more than a shopkeeper. Underneath his functional, calm and bland exterior, Willie is a man who has loved and sacrificed, but above all, Willie is a man who has faithfully--and doggedly--done his duty.

Through Willie's memories, we see him pass from youth, through WWII, and middle age. As Willie goes through his work day, he remembers pivotal events--those who left for war, and those who did not return--and acquaintances such as the enterprising Hancock whose fortunes wax and wane and whose past involves an unpleasant secret.

This brilliant and elegant first novel by Graham Swift folds 40 years of memories into a single day in the life of a remarkable and yet perfectly ordinary man's life. This is a book to be savoured, and one that I shall return to again and again.

An exceptional first novel from an important novelist, thus 5 stars. Here, Graham Swift looks at boundaries: The narrow geographical boundaries of the small London suburb in which the story is set ("We never moved out of these narrow bounds. Born here, schooled here, worked here,") and the narrow emotional boundaries of his characters' relationships (The paragraph continues, "And even when I met her I stood here on the common and thought: enough, now everything is in its place, and I in mine.") The theme of narrow boundaries is deftly rendered in the relationship of the sweet-shop owner, Willie Chapman, and his wife Irene who, from the start, sets the limits of their relationship, and in the father/daughter and the mother/daughter relationships, all locked within narrow confines.
Swift is quoted as saying: "I think if you know that you have a talent, then . . . you should try not to dissipate it. You should try to hold onto it and keep it, concentrate it - not to do as the whole world tends to do these days, and diversify. Diversification doesn't work with art. Keep the old firm in business, don't go into other fields of trade." Although some believe that his later work reveals a talent as a dramatist, may his "old firm" of novel writing thrive well into the future.

From the first sentence, I draw into this poignant, spellbinding story. Although I think Willy, his wife and his daughter hurt each other and all of them become victim, I could identify with any of them.

What a poignant and eloquent account of life (or at least the illusion of being alive) by an obviously seasoned and sensitive artist! Swift describes the sublimely vivid yet hazy realizations about a bookish yet intuitive academic's quest for the pure meaning in his life. Delicious portraits of life in Paris, recollections of finding and losing true love and friendship, and a yearning to prove or disprove the validity of doctrinized religion are blended amidst the collage of dabbles with sexuality, betrayal, perceptions of human nature, and the tragic Hamlet condition of jealousy pangs for a mother who, upon close character inspection, has even further muddled the once secure ideals regarding family and lineage. There is hardly any well-defined escape out of this complicated entangling, but the seemingly nonexistent resolution may actually shed an enlightening view upon the meaning of existence... if you read closely enough between the lines. Savor this one and enjoy.

Graham Swift is the last great story teller-- a combination of Ernest Hemingway and Aesop. By juxtaposing the first person narrative of a disenchanted college proffessor (sp?) and the diaries of an early believer in the evolutionary theaory of nature (Darwin), Swift spins a tale of morality without a moral, and draws paralells between the two protagonists and their respective searches for the answer to one untimelly question- does anythnig really matter? Swift's vivid yet spare prose mirrors the paradoxical nature of both his main characters. Each is at once vulnerable and cynical, courageous but exhausted, afraid to be alone, and afraid of intimacy. Swift could have ended by providing a clearly defined answer to his own characters question thus weakening the realistic tone he had set throughout. However, he refuses to tie such a neat bow. Swift merelly aknowledges that asking the question "is anything divine?" is more important than finding a concrete answer. Swift supposes finally that life is a journey made of questions and we can either rejoice in the precarious nature of such a subjective path, or allow it to cause us to despair. On the way from page one to the last paragraph, the reader is made to sift through interesting musings concerning Shakespeare, Darwinism, Paris, male/female relationships, suicide, and academic politics. Graham Swift is possibly the finest modern English writer, and this is quite possibly his finest novel to date.

When Harry Beech refers to his fiancee as "She's out of this world." he reveals a happy conclusion to a life wrought with the kind of unspoken trauma not often made public. Although growing up in and inheriting monetary affluence, he has strained relationships with both his father, a physically disabled WWI veteran, and his daughter, child of his deceased wife. Emerging from a labyrinth of personal crisis, in the backdrop of the 20th century, Harry Beech does manage to mend his life and find some degree of lasting happiness. This work is deeply moving in a way that causes one to reexamine the "constants" which ordinarily typify modern life.

Graham Swift is a proven master of the brooding British drama and he continues here with a history of a family spanning several decades, wars and generations. Swift plumbs the depths of parental guilt, photographers' responsibility and terrorism. You emerge from this book battered but feeling a bit more clear about life in general.

This book is one of a kind! It is the kind of book that everyone who golfs should own. This book even has an illustration for the definitions of Knickers and Plus Fours. . .she's even kind of cute! A must have book!!!!

Sorry, National Enquirer. This is a work of fiction. I read this book at the same time as Tom Swift and His Electronic Retroscope. The title was changed for the paperback edition which is what I have. The hardcover's Tom Swift and His Spectromarine Selector. For those who've never read it, and are wondering what it's about, what's written above sums it up. Tom Swift and his friends have a naval commander on board their plane, the Sky Queen, when a Swift cargo jet carrying Tom's latest invention, the Spectromarine Selector, mysteriously crashes. The commander, Tom finds out through a phone call from his chief of security, Harlan Ames, is an imposter. The real commander had never left Washington. Tom and Bud go to Fearing Island, his spaceport and research facility. They take one of his jet- marines and discover a sunken submarine. They think it's an enemy sub when they discover tools stamped with a "V" for Varada Steelworks. A company taken over by the new government of Brungaria. Tom's father calls his friends in Washington and the truth comes out that it was an American submarine that had gone down and the captain had used Varada tools and they were a souvenir from the time he'd first entered the Navy. Tom's driven off the road by someone in a black car because he's in a race with the Brungarians to see who'll control Atlantis. Another expedition is mounted. Longneck Ebber, the accomplice of the first saboteur, stows away and tries to him but he fails. Tom Swift wins another battle in the Cold War and claims Atlantis for the United States

This book was masterfully told in the form of a retrospective by a history teacher, Tom Crick, who is being forced into early retirement under the guise of "cut backs." Crick's narrative takes the reader through hundreds of years of history, painting pictures of youthful sexual experimentation; love; betrayal; mental illness and even baby-snatching. Crick is disheartened by his forced early retirement and disallusioned by life. He struggles to answer the question "Why, Why, Why?" regarding his own life by answering his pupil's question as to why history is important. His student feels that the here and now is important and to dwell on the past is a waste of time. Crick searches for answers by giving his class a history lesson on his youth and his anscestry. The story takes many twists and turns and shows us the consequences of the actions of many of the men in this history teacher's "history." Swift takes the reader through a botched abortion performed on Mary, the love of Crick's life, and we are privy to the physical and mental consequences of that act. Swift provides wonderful characters such as Dick, Tom's brother, who reminded me of Steinbeck's Lenny in the masterpiece "Of Mice and Men." Waterland tells tales of insanity, giving us characters like Sarah Atkinson who goes nuts as a result of domestic abuse and mistrust by her husband who shares Crick's first name. Sarah shows up at various other points as a ghost, adding a sense of mysticism to the tale. Swift takes chances on subjects that are often taboo, such as incest and child abduction. Crick's mother who was adored by his father, had a sexual relationship with her father. We are given insight into the relationship and provided with her point of view. She is not viewed as a villain in the novel. To the contrary, she is idolized by Crick's father and forever mourned after her passing. Swift gives an account of the process that Mary, who is now Crick's wife, goes through to steal a baby from a young mother. She is not portrayed as an evil, vicious child abductor. The reader is given the story of her life and taken through her history, leading us to her ultimate mental breakdown. We see the affects of this breakdown on our narrator, Tom Crick. Swift goes a long way to show that every action has a consequence and history is something to be learned from if it is not to be repeated. Mary and Sarah Atkinson suffered the same fate of mental breakdown. Crick hopes to convey this lesson in life to Price, as Swift hopes to convey this lesson to his readers. This book was an absolute page-turner and didn't pass judgement on its characters. The unique thing about this novel was that topics that are normally avoided or harshly judged, were presented with their ultimate consequences and left to the reader to be evaluated. Swift obviously trusted the intelligence of his readers to make their own analysis as to the morality of his captivating cast of characters.

In the midst of a land whose evolution and utter existence is dependent on the continuous flow of water, Swift creates a novel that is absolutely inspiring. The events and characters date back centuries ago, allowing Swift's keen knowledge of people and places to intricately weave each detail together. He develops a story full of love and hate, good and evil, family secrets and affairs. The narrator of the story, a master-minded history teacher being forced to resign, decides to tell the tales of history with a personal twist. His audience, a pubescent group of Catholic school boys and girls, listen in awe to his heart-wrenching, frightful account of ancestral events. The history Mr. Crick is teaching is about life and humanity, experiences and development, surprises and disappointments. The story has its foundation built upon a land of ale making and family traditions that, despite being set centuries ago, would knock the socks off of the modern society we live in today. Waterland is a novel that causes its reader to curiously question the succession of events in a lifetime. There is an emotional attachment to each main character and, at the same time, a psychologically intriguing component associated with every event that occurs. This is a story that leaves its audience silent to contemplate on the horrors and genious of the plot, and the so-called "rules" built into family living.

As Graham Swift begins the weaving of his tale of Tom Crick's exploration of his life and history by talking to his class of teenage boys, it is impossible to even begin to imagine what path the story is going to take. "Waterland" starts it's history by mentioning "fairy-tale words; fairy-tale advice. But we lived in a fairy-tale place" (1). Instantenously, the reader realizes the submergence into a mix of fantasy and reality in the history of Crick's development. Crick tries to explain to his students the history of the Fen country but his confussing approach leaves bits and pieces missing until the last third of the novel. Crick's own desire to share with his students the story of "magic" ale, the exploration of what love is, the search for reason, and natural history is spawned by his teaching position and the department of history being removed. Similar to streams that flow into a greater body of water, Crick connects pieces of history, personal, world, and natural, into one blend.
Crick experiences loss on every level, the loss of a child, the loss of his wife's sanity, the loss of his family, and the loss of his own innocence and idealism. Crick is essentially drowned by inability to justify the incidents which he had witnessed. Perhaps the reason he is a history teacher is the chance for him to claim some sense of objectivity over the past, if he can not do so in his personal life. A history teacher is "someone who teaches mistakes" (235). Crick is able to show others' mistakes in his 30 years of teaching, but when his job is lost there is no reason to continue to try and hide the strangeness of how he reached where he is.
The reoccuring theme of Natural history binds the entire novel together. From the mating habits of eels to the development of human sexuality, "Waterland" addresses the fact that things occur in nature that can not be fully understood. A father has fallen in love with his daughter and acted upon it; that may be a part of history but how is it defined as natural "because when fathers love daughters and daughters love fathers it's like tying up into a knot the thread that runs into the future, it's like a stream wanting to flow backwards" (228). Death occurs regardless of what is done to try and stop it, that is natural. But in Crick's history, murder is prevelant as well and he can not justify that as natural. Crick can not justify either the development of his brother. Nothing that should be natural is natural in the life of Crick.
Swift presents Crick's tale of attempting to explain history in an entrancing form worthy of being defined a fairy-tale. In an attempt to escape the past people become consumed with the need to try and explain the lives of others. Crick serves as the proof that there is only so long that a person can hide from his past. The novel may appear to start densely and slowly, but as the progression through the story takes place and pieces fit together, the movement is quickened and similar to a river after a long rain. The pouring of information and the honest of the tale allows for the connections and development of self. This is an incredible story of learning to embrace the history of self and recognize it's connection to the natural history of the entire world. Swift's novel is one of escape and finding what the fairy tale is in one's own life.

A collection of short stories from Graham Swift, whose novels "Waterland" and "Last Orders" I thoroughly enjoyed and would recommend.

As with most collections of short stories, the quality is mixed: some are tightly plotted and well executed, other are somewhat inconsequential, and one ("The Watch") I found totally weird.

I thought thay the connecting theme of the stories was Swift's view of the imperfections of human nature and relationships - and provided people realise the truth as opposed to the images we delude ourselves with, the diffuculty of coming to terms with our failings. Swift takes what should be in conventional terms "comfortable" situations and scratches beneath the surface to explore inner feelings and tensions. Very introspective stuff.

Graham Swift, Learning to Swim and Other Stories (Washington Square Press, 1982)

Graham Swift is something of a one-trick pony, actually, but the one trick he does he does exceptinoally well. This is less obvious when you're reading the man's wonderful novels-- Waterland, for instance, which someone will hopefully soon canonize as one of the classics of twentieth-century literature-- but when you get digging into a story collection, you realize that Swift, or a close family member, was in the throes of the nasty ending of a relationship while he was writing these stories. His main characters, at least those of an age to be so,
are almost alwast divorced men, and the tale of the leaving wife is either the main thread of the story or part of the circumstance leading up to the main part of the story. Swift just takes that tale and paints it with different hues.

Any fan of Mondrian or his brethren will hasten to comment here that different hues are usually enough to make the same thing interesting anew. Indeed, and such is the case with Swift's stories. Recognizing the similarity between the characters doesn't make them any less interesting, and it certainly doesn't lessen the top-notch quality of Swift's writing, which has
yet to flag in any book of his I've read even for an instant. The man is truly gifted.

It's likely the publication date will give some readers pause. Yes, it's a collection of short stories published during the nineteen eighties. And yes, that should set off justifiable alarm bells in the reader who's been turned off to eighties lit. But what characterizes the good eighties lit (Vanderhaeghe, Swift, McInerney on his good days) and separates it from the bad eighties lit (Ellis, McInerney on his bad days) is emotion. Rest assured that Swift has emotion in spades. While his stories cover much of the same territory as those of his contemporaries, Swift is not the detached observer who narrated most eighties fiction; he is down in the muck of emotion, and has no qualms about dragging the reader in with him.

Another excellent book from Graham Swift. ****

Great writer, great book! Enjoy it, dear friends!

I think I must be missing something.

Perhaps because I'm a girl, and this is a story of male loves and friendships, I found this book profoundly unsatisfying. It should have pushed all the right buttons - the story of four friends going to scatter the ashes of the man whose presence interwove their lives. With a premise like that, and an author as lyrical as Swift, it should have been a deep and moving meditation on mortality and the patterns that make up our lives.

But it wasn't.

Or, at least, I didn't find it so. Judging by the host of commendations it received, this was my fault, not the book's.

For me, though, this book fell down in a number of concrete ways.

The story is told through several voices, but I found three of the main voices, Len, Vic and Ray difficult to differentiate. (Perhaps, said the voice inside me which believes the Booker Prize judges, he was trying to say that they're very similar people really. Maybe, but if so, this was a confusing way to do it.)

The characters were incredibly articulate about their feelings internally, but extremely inarticulate towards one another. (The voice of the Booker Prize said - ah, this is a marvellous truth - the things left unspoken, the words we can never say.... But my own taste said - this doesn't make sense. The fact that they think one thing and then say something completely different to each other just makes it seem that they're lying.)

It seemed unrealistic that the lives of these people would be so heavily dependent on one another. (The Booker Prize said - beautiful! The interweaving of one person's life with another - the unintended effects...)

What can I say? I wish I could point to a single glaring fault and say "that just ruined it for me," but I can't. Everything that the Booker Prize says is true, and yet it just didn't strike me that way.

From reading what others have written here, it seems that there is a definite split, which comforts me because, in the final analysis, what I saw here was a book that would have been meditative and thoughtful if it had had anything to meditate on or think about.

Graham Swift's "Last Orders" is a beautifully written novel about how the life-long friends of a recently deceased come together to carry out his last wishes to have his ashes scattered at a seaside town. Told through the eyes of his wife and buddies, the vantage point shifts from one to the other, as family secrets, private pains, hopes and aspirations are revealed through their alternating rumination. The dialogue (if you can describe the barely literate half slurred half spat sentences that spew from their mouths as dialogue) is authentic and evocative of the working class milieu. There is also a gentleness and grace about the reflections of the ensemble cast that lend a special poignance to this "boys tale". Though their talk centre on drinking and betting and male bonding type activities, it is the revelation of their domestic lives and their problems with wives and children that shape the novel. In as much as I derived great reading pleasure and would recommend the book highly to friends, I also found certain aspects of it frustrating. If Swift had been less obscure and more directly explanatory about some of the characters, it would have made for a tighter and more satisfying read and deserved a full five-star rating.

Graham Swift's novel Last Orders has a marvelous premise: a group of elderly gentlemen -- all veterans of the Second World War -- travel from London to scatter in the sea the ashes of a recently deceased comrade. The dearly departed's son, a car dealer, is also with them. On the way, they reflect on their lives, wives, triumphs and disappointments. At one point, two of the men get into a fight. All of this is meant to be both funny (it is) and poignant (it is, sometimes)

Swift's novel has reveived marvelous reviews, so I started with great anticipation after it became available at our local library. I must disagree with the universal critical acclaim. To me, Swift just misses in many of his scenes (his characters, in contrast, are jems). As I read, I kept thinking, "this is supposed to be a wonderful book, yet my mind keeps wandering. What's wrong with me?" After reading some of the other Amazon.com reader comments, I must conclude that the flaw is Swift's.

Are we even reading the same book? My son's Comp I class was assigned this book, and I tried to read it but didn't get past the first 100 pages. The main character is flat and boring, and he seems intent on sharing his every dull thought. I found this a disappointment and don't think it was a very good choice for a freshman lit class either.

For the past 40 years or so I have been looking for what I regard, the perfect book. This is it. I found it on my shelf, of all places. It had been sitting there for years ignored and overlooked for the more preferable reads, the bigger-better authors who garner the biggerst audience. Swift is magic. His main character, Prentis, is as I would draw him, ignomatic, real, diabolical. The book has a lurid, eeire feel to it, not creepy, but weird, the way I like it. Easy to follow but not shallow by any means. Anyone who becomes bored by reading Swift is a moron. There is a pile of substance between those simple lines, it just takes a littel intellect to find it.

Following Graham Swift's well-deserved successes with Waterland & Last Orders, I'm amazed this book remains virtually unknown. It is one of my all-time favourites, repaying multiple readings.

It works on several levels - as a straight thriller (is the narrator really paranoid? is Quinn insane? what's the truth about Prentice Snr, a mute inmate in a mental hospital), as a wonderfully vivid decriptive novel (Wimbledon, the London underground & Eastern France are all brought to life magnificently), a terrific gallery of characters, a study on family relations, guilt and expectations ... I could go on.

My advice: buy it, read it & pass it on to your friends.