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Articles and Reviews: BOOKS
Day
By A.L. Kennedy
(Jonathan Cape, £16.99 Sterling)
Alfred Day, former tail-gunner in
a Lancaster bomber during WW2, is the protagonist
of Alison Kennedy’s fifth novel. It is now 1949,
and Alfred, only 25 but feeling more like 50, is finding
he’s not very good at peace. The only boy in
a family of girls, with a drunken, abusive fishmonger
father and a doting and doted on mother, the war (or
more specifically, the R.A.F., or more exactly still,
his flying crew) offered him a previously unimagined
camaraderie, and an escape from his rural Staffordshire
origins and having to follow his father into his smelly
trade. For all the rigid class structure of Britain,
reflected in the officer class/ordinary ranks divide
of the armed forces, the war was a great leveller,
with everyone mucking in together. But look at him
now, trying not very successfully to negotiate the
readjustment to civilian life, a way of being as an
adult that he has never properly known.
He has been working in his friend
Ivor’s bookshop in London, although they don’t
seem to sell many books. Not that he’s very
bothered, since the autodidact Alfred has always been
fond of reading. What’s really eating him is
numbness, a sense of psychological paralysis occasioned
by the loses he has accumulated: his mother, ostensibly
felled by a falling roof slate, although Alfred suspects,
rightly or wrongly, that his father had something
to do with her demise; his crew, since he was the
only survivor when his plane was shot down over Hamburg
in 1943 on their penultimate 29th bombing mission;
and his girlfriend Joyce, a chance encounter during
the Blitz, then as now unhappily married to a lieutenant
she hardly knew before he was sent off to Malaya,
went missing – either dead or imprisoned –
who has returned with major trauma (i.e. he never
leaves their house). Then Alfred also has his experiences
as a German PoW to deal with, not least of which is
the death of his friend from the camp, Ringer, who
saved him, but whom he failed to save.
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So, when the novel opens, we discover
he has volunteered as an extra in a prison-camp movie
being shot in Germany, trying to find the piece of him
that had come adrift in the real prison. He is surrounded
by actors playing the war, new and old service men,
‘good’ Germans and displaced persons, and
among them are people like him, who won't talk about
what happened. Then there are the kind of people he
was fighting, like the nasty piece of work that is the
Nazi collaborator Vasyl, really Latvian but claiming
to be Ukrainian because he thinks this will ease his
passage into British residency, whose personal (im)morality,
or code of survival, is summed up succinctly in his
saying: ‘It’s like this – you kiss
your wife, I take away her face – which one of
us is more sensible? You hold on to her hand when she
can’t feel and then I stop you feeling –
which one of us is more sensible? You care about your
daughter – I train my dog to fuck your daughter
– you still care – which one of us is more
sensible?’
The film set affords the opportunity
for some arch but telling postmodern irony: ‘Penalty
for non-compliance, one hour in the sun with hands up.
They’d be filming that next: trembling British
arms and British sweat, very dramatic – lots of
sympathy you’d get with that – now that
it wasn’t happening any more, now that is was
a story.’ Kennedy even pushes it as far as having
some (real) ex-prisoners trying to tunnel out of their
(fake) new camp, unbeknownst to the production crew.
Some of this inner circle take Alfred under their wing,
offering him a new start, with false black market identity
papers and the chance to be someone else, an option
Alfred gives some consideration.
The novel, then, is about the crushing
weight of guilt, and the redemptive power of love. If
that sounds trite, it isn’t meant to. It is also,
strangely enough, given its forensic delineation of
the darker propensities of human nature, perhaps Kennedy’s
most optimistic longer work to date. In the end, Alfred
decides to accept his lot, be himself, go back to London,
and take a chance on contacting Joyce.
In these homogenised, commodified
times, it is increasingly rare to find a writer with
both a signature style, and a sensibility (the two are
intimately linked), so distinctly their own that they
are instantly recognisable upon opening one of their
books, and could not be anyone else’s. A.L. Kennedy
is such an artist, and Day handsomely extends
her already highly impressive achievement in contemporary
fiction.
First published in The Sunday Independent
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