When a writer wins the Booker Prize - with the huge lift in publicity and sales it brings - publishers are usually keen to get a new novel in to the shops as quickly as possible.

But Graham Swift has resolutely refused to live up to his surname and has waited seven years after winning the Booker for Last Orders to publish his new novel The Light Of Day.

Watch the whole programme

(Edited highlights of the panel's review)

MARK LAWSON:
A reading from Graham Swift's new novel about the relationship of a prisoner and a private detective who visits her.

Michael Gove, it is always hard to follow a Booker winner. He has waited seven years - has that wait paid off?

MICHAEL GOVE:
I don't think so. On one level it's an impressive work of art. It's impressive novelistic engineering.

The change in time from the events of one day, the flash backs which Graham Swift uses to tell the story of how this peculiar love affair came into being, that is realised with real precision and skill.

But the heart of the novel is missing. We don't really fully understand why it is that the woman who is in prison actually was driven to murder her adulterous husband.

Nor can we fully appreciate why this unremarkable but fairly intelligent detective falls in love with her because her character is not sufficiently well delineated for her to be a compelling love interest.

MARK LAWSON:
It has been said there are two kinds of novelist, the ones who put stuff in and the ones who take stuff out.

As Michael suggests, he has taken a lot out. There are huge gaps in these two relationships.

GERMAINE GREER:
I am not bothered about the fact that the characters are not delineated fully. That has always been an artificial thing.

The people we live with, we couldn't delineate fully. The important thing is to make them come alive.

What comes alive for me in this novel is the day, the frosty day, the light, the light falling in bars.

There are all sorts of meticulously observed moments.

You have to believe that it's the ex-cop who has turned into a cook who has imagined these moments.

There are all kinds of incredibilities, one of them is that he is that kind of private detective.

MARK LAWSON:
A very literary kind?

GERMAINE GREER:
Well, not terribly, he speaks in fragments of sentences.

MARK LAWSON:
I mean coming out of books? End of the Affair, that kind of detective.

GERMAINE GREER:
Yes. But we have to believe he is sensitive because he has become a cook.

He is not so sensitive that he could tell that his daughter is a lesbian. It took him the longest time. We all knew.

But there's the question of do women in 2003 not tell their husbands that they are sleeping with someone? Do they really pay some seedy bastard that they find in a shop front?

Along with this extremely believable account of a November day in London, there is this unbelievability about the circumstances we started out with.

MARK LAWSON:
I have to say it is 1995-1997 so maybe there has been a big lift since then.

GERMAINE GREER:
You reckon? I don't.

MARK LAWSON:
Sam Taylor-Wood, it's that combination of a simple plot, where we guess what is happening and this complicated structure of the two-time systems, did he pull that off?

SAM TAYLOR-WOOD:
I thought the time construct of it was interesting, the way that he flashes back and forward and it becomes obsessive in the way that he is moving time around.

But it tried my patience. I didn't feel that I could cope with the obsession. I didn't want to become a part of that obsession, so I didn't.

MARK LAWSON:
Germaine, this is a writer with a big following in the past. Certainly with Waterland and winning the Booker.

There is a feeling that something has gone wrong. What do you think has happened here?

GERMAINE GREER:
He's always been in a way a sort of minimalist. Maybe he should be more minimalist. Maybe with less of a story. It's the moments in this book that are alive.

The sudden perception of things like the bars of light falling across the room or someone walking between the November light.

You are aware all the time of the low sky, the streets, what people are doing.

It smelled of the Lamp in a way, it was almost as if he had gone back and re-written this November day a thousand times.

It did become sort of still-born. As if you were looking at it in amber. This is a lapidary technique but it won't get us anywhere.

In the end of the book you got nowhere, you go round in a circle.

MARK LAWSON:
The Light of Day by Graham Swift is published in hardback next week.

This transcript was produced from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight. It has been checked against the programme as broadcast, however Newsnight can accept no responsibility for any factual inaccuracies. We will be happy to correct serious errors.