![]() Even Pritchett would have faltered at ‘Golf – it’s not exactly action, but it isn’t sitting on your arse.’ And even Pritchett tended to use vernacular in a too literary way, like someone consciously trying to turn Chekhov into English. Pritchett, whose music can be heard in Swift’s novel (Pritchett, like Swift, was very fond of that shy petty-bourgeois English apology, ‘a bit of a’), never kept up this kind of voice for longer than a novella. Discovered, in fact, a bit of a flair.’ V.S. I saw it, never having lived it, exactly, myself. ![]() And once life had been, maybe, a kind of constant, regular feast. It was something for her too, a bit of a thing, a passion. A writer must have a very steady hand to maintain a truly flat voice over two hundred pages: ‘Cooking. Perhaps this doesn’t sound daring but it is certainly risky. It dares the ordinariness of flat, repetitious, unliterate narration. ![]() Meanwhile, stream of consciousness, apparently the most realistic of modes, is the mandarin’s way of slowing down literary detail, the better to pluck its lustres surely no one ever thought that Leopold Bloom, rather than Joyce, would notice and document ‘the flabby gush of porter’ and ‘the buzzing prongs’ of a fork in just those fine words?īut The Light of Day is as close to seeming spoken as any novel I have read. A novel’s narrator, supposedly ‘speaking’ to the reader, generally writes to the reader, since few writers dare to smother their only eloquence even Faulkner’s narrators, particularly in As I Lay Dying (a novel that had some influence on Swift’s Last Orders), sound little like children or illiterates. ![]() First-person narration (and its posher cousin, stream of consciousness) is almost always a giant fudge. The Light of Day is narrated by George Webb, a bent (though honourably bent) ex-policeman, now a private eye with an office in the middle of Wimbledon. They would be mistaken, because the novel’s commitment to ordinary speech only shows what games most literary novels really are. This is how, chapter after chapter, Swift’s new novel is written, and there may be readers so incredulous at the even grey of its stylistic climate that they feel the need to take a warmer holiday after only a few pages, convinced that some cold literary game is being played on them. Then the roundabout at Tibbet’s Corner and the turn for Wimbledon. This passage continues, daring the reader to rebel against its flatness: ‘Past the station, through the traffic lights, the climb up Putney Hill. Superdrug, Body Shop, Marks and Spencer.’ These particular shops a blaze? Only to a suburban fire-eater. (Forget the Napoleon of Notting Hill.) In a novel intensely and explicitly interested in cliché and banality, it is hard not to hear an ironic grimace in a passage like this: ‘Putney High Street: the blaze of shops. His two chief characters, George Webb, a private detective, and Sarah Nash, his client, grew up in Chislehurst, and are much taken with the apparently true fact that the Emperor Napoleon III and the Empress Eugénie lived for many years on the site of what is now the Chislehurst golf club. It is set in Wimbledon, but ventures, if that is the word, to Putney, to Hammersmith, to Chislehurst, even to Broadstairs. Swift’s new novel returns to the South-West London of his first two books. Nowadays a novelist’s characters may themselves be knowingly aware of the effects of place. ![]() Graham Swift knows all about such effects, and knows – as Pinter does – that they will probably now be self-conscious, deliberate dives into the sublime banal. There is a kind of Folkestone tradition: Eliot with Margate in The Waste Land, Pinter with Sidcup in The Caretaker, McEwan with Dollis Hill in The Innocent. Rummaging around, in a notebook entry of 1896, for the properly grim place to deposit his unfortunate heroine, Maisie Farange, Henry James alights on Folkestone, and with grey satisfaction asks himself: ‘don’t I get an effect from Folkestone?’ James does indeed get an ‘effect’, in What Maisie Knew, from Folkestone: from the name, from the town, from its seaside hotel, from the ‘cold beef and Apollinaris’ consumed by Maisie and her stepfather. ![]()
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