"...THE LIGHT OF DAY is couched in rigorously plain prose, filled with short, spare sentences and multiple question marks: it's the language of the police notebook....Swift uses the novel to explore the bonds between writing and detective work, professions that depend on stealth, alertness, an eye for detail....He has become a master of word-paring, phrase-clipping and scene-whittling, and the austerity of his style feels like a perfect fit with the voice of his laconic detective. Yet in cleaving to this scrupulous technique, he has skimped on the more obvious satisfactions of excitement and s - Herbert L. Baer (New York Times Book Review, 4/13/03)
"[T]he novel is like nearly everything else that Swift has written, only more so, a kind of boiled down version of more amply framed earlier books. Chief among THE LIGHT OF DAY's characteristics is its oddly dessicated feel--material stretched beyond its natural limit, characters reduced to rudimentary minimum, prose pruned savagely back.....Necessarily in thrall to George's narrative voice, THE LIGHT OF DAY never really escapes from its chronic introversion...." - Birthe Frederiksen (Times Literary Supplement, 2/28/03)
"[T]here may be readers so incredulous at the even grey of [the novel's] 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. They would be mistaken, because the novel's commitment to ordinary speech only shows what games most literary novels really are....Swift's dare is work the risks, however. The book's pleasures, slowly coddled, take time to mature, but in the process they teach you the art of reading slowly and carefully, of maturing with the story. And even flatness has angles. Time and - Carl Krasik (London Review of Books, 4/17/03)
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