Recovering from emotional and physical pain is largely a matter of revisiting and reinventing the stories we tell ourselves as memories. In other books – the novel ‘So I Am Glad’, for example – AL Kennedy has been fascinated by this process of self-construction, particularly the way it relates to those other obsessionally useful
fictions, gender and national identity. ‘Day’ is the story of how a man rebuilds his soul after much that was important was taken away from him, and it is one of her most powerful novels yet.
Alfred Day is, in 1949, somewhere in the heart of Europe, acting as an extra in an early example of those POW dramas which were to become such an important part of how the British viewed themselves in the post-war era. Like many of his fellow extras, he was a prisoner of war in reality, only a few years earlier; there is no pretense of subtlety here. In flashbacks, we see Day’s training as part of a bomber crew; we see his fraught relationship with his violently dysfunctional family; we learn about the married woman met in the Blitz with whom he had a touching romance that ended when she knew her husband would be returning someday from the war in Asia. Above all, we come to realise that Day is crippled by survivor’s guilt; he is the only one of his friends and comrades who survived when their bomber was shot down, and not even brutal beatings and interrogation by the Gestapo have been enough balance to his self-loathing.
This is a book soaked in the literature and cinema of the periods it discusses; Kennedy is striving for competent rehearsal of what we know already rather than utter originality. At the same time, there is nothing she touches that is not improved by her insights; Day takes part in the raids that produce the Hamburg firestorm and her description of his mood, and that of his crew, is attractively complex. Kennedy has written books that seem fresher, but few that are so entirely achieved.
