Perfect form, shady character

George Webb was thrown out of the police force for losing his temper while interviewing a suspect and putting his hands round his throat (but he's a loveable old throttler: the man he attacked was a racist). George is now a private investigator, snooping on adulterers.

On one such case, he fell into the arms of the lovely Rita - or rather, not to be too indelicate, she fell into his groin. She now works as his PA and fellow-investigator. The scene is Wimbledon. George is separated from his wife; and his daughter, with whom he has distant relations, is a lesbian. George is a regular prison-visitor. He goes to see a woman called Sarah Nash, who was one of his clients. She hired him to go to the airport and watch her husband, a gynaecologist, say goodbye to his Croatian girlfriend, Kristina. Sarah wants to know whether this girl is leaving, and whether the philandering gynaecologist will go with her.

George has to ring her to give her the news. When he rings to say that her husband is on the way home, she sounds overjoyed. She goes upstairs, changes into her slinkiest black dress, puts on a string of pearls, and sharpens the kitchen knife. She's chopping parsley to scatter over the coq au vin, but when the gynaecologist gets home, something comes over her, and he ends up lying on the kitchen floor in a pool of blood.

All these things are seen in a repeated series of flashbacks in the course of one office day, in which George is leaving Rita in charge of the office while he goes on his fortnightly visit to Sarah - with whom he is obsessively in love.

Graham Swift may not be Grinling Gibbons, but he is a consummate joiner. His books fit together as well as a perfectly crafted bevelled halving.

What they have rather lacked since the best of them - Waterland (1983) - is a powerful sense of felt life. When I was a Booker judge, we gave the prize to Last Orders. One of the more thoughtful judges said: "This is, in its way, a perfect novel." He meant well-crafted. Afterwards, we were told by wiseacres that the book was a crib of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. I don't think that matters, but what does matter is that we don't remember the characters in Last Orders, only the shape.

I shall remember the consummate construction of The Light of Day, but the author never developed any of the characters or made them interesting. Choosing an ex-cop as the narrator was a bit of a risk since, in order to speak plausibly in such a man's voice, Swift has to use cliche and repetition, much of which palls. This would not matter if George, the detective, and Sarah came alive for us. For me, this felt like the clever outline of a novel rather than the novel itself.