What I said then:
An incredibly dreary looking book about an inmate in a women’s prison.
What I say now:
I had it wrong. Sarah, the inmate in the women's prison is barely in the book at all; she is actually more of a MacGuffin. I wasn't wrong about the dreariness, though ...
The Light of Day is the story of George, a private detective who, over the course of a day in which he briefly visits Sarah in prison (she's a former client), thinks back over his life. The structural similarities to Cat's Eye are very marked, and it's possibly because I loved Atwood's novel so much that Swift's left me a bit cold.
George, our narrator, tells his story in an incredibly roundabout fashion which, for the first fifty or a hundred pages, often left me confused as to what was going on, and to whom. Swift, via George, tells multiple strands of his story all at once, interweaving them --- which would be fine, except he often jumps between them with no warning and doesn't give the reader any way of figuring out where we're at now. Sometimes he'd only spend a single paragraph in whatever time and place he was writing about, and sometimes it was only a sentence!
If you're going to faff about with confused timelines, then you've got to give the reader a bit of a hand keeping up. Swift refuses, so I was often forced to backtrack and re-read because the 'she' I thought he was writing about turned out to be a different 'she' altogether. Also not helping was the fact that the four major women in George's life all have incredibly dull, ordinary names: Helen; Sarah; Rachel and Rita. Their boring names, coupled with the fickle jumping about in time, meant I was well into the book before I could remember which was his ex, which was his daughter, which was his former lover and secretary, and which was his former client who murdered her husband who he's now in love with, who's in prison. Based on those descriptions I just gave, it really shouldn't have been tough to remember who was who!
Given the way it was structured, I thought that the George of the novel's present would, through thinking about his past, come to some realisation about himself, or figure something out, or learn something. But he never did. George narrates his whole story, but the telling of it doesn't change him in any way; he's already got everything straight in his own mind. How he is at the start of the book, is exactly how he is at the book's close, which made the novel feel kind of insubstantial. Why is George telling the story of his life, if it's not going to change him? Why write about a character who has all the answers?
One thing I did enjoy about the book was the way that it used the crime/thriller genre to subvert my expectations. Because George is a private detective and because one of the strands of the narrative details how Sarah came to be in prison, you're led to expect some kind of revelation or twist. Swift pulls a swifty by satisfying that expectation in a completely unexpected, un-genre-y way. Saying any more, of course, would be to spoil it, but it was the one moment while reading the book that I thought I was feeling what the author wanted me to (unless he actually wanted me to be swinging between bored and frustrated for most of it ... which I doubt).
Cheers, JC.
about to read: To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway
books to go: 104
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