Fiction: Funny thing, the mind, the way it works, the often random but deliberate connections it makes. An individual consciousness can revisit an entire life in a matter of hours. Sensations are explored, reactions analysed, feelings remembered.
This is exactly what happens to George, fallen policeman and abandoned husband turned private investigator, as he spends a day pondering the changes created by his involvement in a routine adultery case. Except it wasn't all that routine and it's left him in a state of longing; in thrall to a guilt and an obsession built on little except desperate hope.
The Light of Day is a convincing, sympathetic performance; it sees the poetry and the tragedy lurking in an ordinary life, told by an ordinary voice. All the mistakes, the bad timing, the horrible chance discoveries that destroy trust, the pathetic little weaknesses that snatch at hope are contained in a narrative that appears so restrained and so very careful. Above all, it is so true to George, a middle-aged, not quite world-weary anti-hero who has somehow always managed to lose his way while also taking up bits of comfort offered here and there.
He has no delusions about himself, but he has tried, even to having finally learnt to eat properly by cooking good food. Fact is, he has always tried too hard. But he is human, far from stupid and he is real, never a caricature of the sharp old cop who has made his mistakes. George is also further evidence of Swift's ability to create and sustain a character through a voice that is true to its life, experience and social class.
When his hostile teenage daughter challenges him, "'You're a detective, Dad. But you don't see things. You don't notice things'", George duly tries to please her. "I even went to art galleries, and looked - and yawned. I even mugged up on her favourite painter, Caravaggio (they all looked like waxworks to me). And found out he was a bit of a tearaway himself, a bit of a thug on the side, always running up against the law. (Was there a message there for me?) A bit of a nancy too."
Since the publication of his outstanding third book, Waterland, one of the truely great post-war British novels - which lost the 1983 Booker Prize to J.M. Coetzee's Life & Times of Michael K and on to his sixth, Last Orders, which won the 1996 Booker, Swift has consistently proved an exciting, original writer. Waterland, a remarkable, layered and philosophical questioning of history and the past and of the enigmatic Fens landscape and its stories, established Swift as an important British writer with an imagination as rich, if not quite as surreal, as that of the maverick genius J.G. Ballard.
Ever After (1992), in which an ageing widower reviews his life and also that of a Victorian ancestor caught up in the mid 19th-century English dilemma of the men of God versus Darwin's men of science, remains one of the great unacknowledged British novels. Swift's fiction asks questions without presuming to answer them.
But for all his questing, his ability to explore the past, history, notions and ideas, he has always possessed a real feel for believable characters as well as an ability to evoke the suburban world that makes up so much of London's ordinary story - and with it, ordinary lives.
It was this, Swift's grasp of south London, that provided the dynamic of Last Orders, an odyssey into the respective pasts of a small group of Londoners as they come together to fulfil the dying wishes of a pal.
They set off on a mission, to scatter old Jack Dodds's ashes out over Margate Pier. The voice that made Last Orders and its multi-voiced narrative, is again evident through this new book with its solo narrator. Just as Last Orders triumphed through its voices with their tones of nostalgia and regret, so does this new work compel through the mood shifts of a largely passive, impressionistic and impressionable narrator.
There is also Swift's understanding of class. Old George, son of a High Street photographer, is no snob but he can't help feeling attracted to Mrs Nash, his client - her with the wandering husband. After all Mrs Nash, Sarah, married to a gynaecologist, is a lecturer and translator, an educated woman and rightful resident of south-west London. It can't fail to impress George whose office is situated upstairs from a tanning studio.
On the surface, Sarah's life looked successful; her own career - in George's words - "a college lecturer. Used to running the show"; a respectable medical man husband, their son now grown and doing well in the US; a smart Wimbledon home complete with, in George's words, "a kitchen to die for" - or in as it turns out. Into this surface perfection and comfort comes Kristina, a young student from Croatia. Her parents have been killed, her handsome brother died in the war. The girl is in a bad way. She has no one. So Sarah takes her into her comfortable home and loses her husband to the young girl with nothing.
Her husband's affair with the young student brings Sarah to George's office. But George, lonely and on the hunt for something, is not too good about professional distance - ask his devoted, possibly despairing assistant, Rita, a woman who may not be too skilled at cooking but knows how to keep an office presentable with "flowers in a brand-new vase, on my desk". It is George's story, but the skilfully sketched Rita who watches it develop. Her instincts are sharper than his - even George knows this.
He tells the story his way. Cryptic, precise, he is used to dealing in facts, but considering his own messy history, is not too sure of himself. It is as if all those facts as well as his memories, his father, the gossip, his betrayed mother, his own marriage and failures, and Sarah's determination to wrest her husband away from his young lover are running about in his head.
George is free and in control - but only just. He erected a memorial bench in a park to his father to please his mother and after her death, adds her name to it as well. "Frank and Jane. If there's someone else sitting there, I'm miffed, I'm even affronted, for a while. Then I relax, I'm strangely pleased. They don't know who I am - how could they? I watch them not knowing who I am. I walk around, I take my turn."
As a portrait of a shadow man, The Light of Day succeeds on many levels. That it is, among other things, an account of a crime of passion adds to its intensity and intimacy. George's innocence only serves to compound the sense of guilt that has always dominated his life. Ultimately he proves dependent on ritual and an energy that feeds on hope.
As always with Swift the immense technique that supports his storytelling is brilliantly concealed beneath the persuasive narrative voice. He has allowed his central character, a man with a professional interest in details, to dictate the telling. Admirers of Last Orders will engage with George's story. It is human and unnerving, very ordinary, all too believable - so very real and so very sad.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
The Light of Day. By Graham Swift. Hamish Hamilton, 244pp. £16.99