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The Light of Day
Graham Swift

Dave Hallsworth

Way back in the olden days when most of the working class visited the cinema at least once a week (long before the continual entertainment of television), buckets of tears were shed over a particular type of film. A prime example was Brief Encounter, a tale of the meeting and falling in love of a married man and a married woman over the table of a railway station platform café. It came to an end, as such things will, by him waving as her train left the station, never to see each other again.

How the women wept. (In those days men didn't weep - there was too much for them to weep about.) It was a story straight out of the women's weekly magazines - Woman's Own, People's Friend, Peg's Weekly - and this is the kind of story that Swift tells in The Light of Day. These stories were all about doctors or teachers or small business people. The working class was either ignored or caricatured, and didn't feature in popular books or films until years later in such as Saturday Night, Sunday Morning. As such, the stories provided an escape from the drabness and reality of the real world as the readers or watchers wallowed in a romantic dream world. Alas the films ended and the stories ended and we were cast out into the light of day.

In The Light of Day, Swift attempts to take us back into those days, except that he joins the current trend of jumping backwards and forwards in the story. The hero, George, is an ex-policeman sacked for trying to strangle a suspect during questioning, and now working as a private eye. He sleeps with his office manager/secretary who obviously worships him. He is employed to follow a woman client's husband and his lover to the airport where the lover is to be put on a plane; the man is then to be shadowed back to the marital home. His client then stabs her unfaithful husband to death with the knife she had been chopping parsley with. (He probably was telling her how to chop it, which would have made it justifiable homicide.)

The story then moves off into this dream world of backwards and forwards. Although George's secretary/lover gives him the best advice - 'Grow up George, get bloody real.' - he is now in the ideal relationship (for him), one of visiting the client Sarah (now serving a twelve year sentence) once a week, and dreaming like Mr Toad of Toad Hall, about, what I could have done if only I had thought of it at the time.

Grow up Graham Swift, get bloody real.