Customer Reviews

Day

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The one and only negative thing I can write about "Day" is that it took me over 30 pages to get fully "oriented"; and while perhaps this device was likely deployed purposefully by the author to communicate the very-same disorientation on the part of the lead character (for him too, time and space have blurred), it was overdone and prevented me from getting pulled in more quickly.

Yet, once I knew where I was in time and space, the book was impossible to put down. I have nothing in common with the leading man, a WWII veteran and RAF gunner. Yet I felt I got into his head; no, more to the point, he got into mine. The result was a combination of discomfort and exhilaration. The story is not one that's easy to swallow and some of the elements are disturbing and visually (for those like me who visualize the story) gory yet appropriate for the war and the period.

The Economist in its review, noted no one would ever tell the author is a woman. I agree. What makes this spell binding is that the man through whose eyes we see the war and understand its emotional aftermath (and largely futile nature) is both insane and aware of his insanity, he examines the loss of his humanity yet is still very human, in love and angry. The writing touched me like very few books have, and I read voraciously so I can speak with some confidence on this.

Anyone with a faint interest in the WWII period, or the human psyche, would want to read this book.

Let me state first of all that I admired Alison Kennedy enormously, and that I have been reading her avidly since "Original Bliss" (which still shakes me up when I reread it and teach it). I was full of hopes for "Day", which at the time of writing has only just been published in the US. I was fortunate enough to get a copy from my UK friends for Christmas.

I was sorely disappointed. I think that such an intimate view of a central protagonist - especially one that becomes "you" hence "us" given the constant slipping into the second person mode of telling - really relies on us being interested in that person, or by finding them singular. As soon as we start to resist the direction given to "you" as a reader, it makes the writer's task doubly difficult. Frankly, Alfie Day as a personality or character didn't carry any interest for me. Instead, I became distracted by the research that Kennedy had clearly carried out into the era, and I found myself ticking off things that she had discovered and placed into the narrative to add authenticity. It is hard to get research into this kind of novel so that it seems organic and part of the work, and not a collection of interesting found materials. If the centre of the novel is Alfie, why this world to set him in? It seems an odd choice for "Day" to be set in WWII - not because the events of that time have lost relevance or importance, but because Alfie might have meant more to us had be been in Iraq, Afghanistan, or even the Falklands.

Kennedy's prose sparkles as usual, but for me it alone can't carry the novel, because the characters and narrative it serves for once don't match it.

I am an airplane nut. This might be the most evocative paragraph I have read regarding the magic and mystery that only airplane nuts feel.

"Circling in from the north-west came a single Lanc, big-chinned, blunt as a whale and open armed and singing. When you heard them like that, far off, you could think they were trying to speak, words hidden underneath the roar, and if you could only work the out, you would understand everything, ou would be saved. "

DayDay (Vintage Contemporaries) is a love story. The love of a WWII Lancaster crewman for his captain and crew; his love of a woman; his love of combat.

Day is the story of hate. His hatred for an abusive father. Hatred of those who bring tyranny over the innocent.

Author A.L. Kennedy brings us Alfred Day the character. His tale dances across time, interweaving an authentic captivity with a staged reinactment offering Day a second chance to untangle the cords of his war.

Read this book. Please.

Alfie Day has been an RAF tail gunner and a starved and beaten POW. The sole survivor of his bomber crew, five years have passed, but he remains one of the millions of walking wounded, living in the scarcity and devastation of post-war Britain. A fishmonger's battered son, he'd half hoped the war would end a life he'd been taught was worthless. Now he struggles with survivors' guilt and a swarm of stabbing memories, bright with the hyper reality of childhood abuse and twenty-nine night bombing missions. The author's elegant prose carries the reader past the near dumb shows of Day's conversation, deep into the clear, always swirling eddies of his thought. This is a man who knows far more than he shows, who processes the violence he's endured. Hoping to find his way out of a paralyzing numbness, he travels to Germany to take part in a movie set in a POW camp. Here the Past, both in memory and in the form of an escaped SS man, confront him. He remembers, hopelessly, the few moments of tenderness in his life, a war time affair with a married woman. Occasionally Day's stream of consciousness left me behind, but the exquisite precision of the writing brought an emotional punch to each and every scene. DAY gives the reader World War ll warts and all, without pieties or flag-waving. Ms. Kennedy, who has won prestigious awards for earlier works, again demonstrates a humbling mastery of her art.

There is so much territory in this book plotwise that has already been explored and by authors closer to the subject matter. I am curious why Kennedy chose to set her novel during World War II, alternating with events three years following the war. By writing a historical novel, she can experiment with style rather than content, which seems to be the case. The book changes repeatedly -- time-wise (the war years, post-war years) and points of view (it is told in first, second and in third person, which despite changes in font, can be confusing).

Many of the characters seem believable, but the central character is somewhat hollow. Yes, it is a memory piece, the memories being those of Alfie Day. But they are not completely realized and sometimes the rhythm of the prose gets interrupted for a baffled reader. I've enjoyed everything else by Kennedy, most particularly EVERYTHING YOU NEED. But this time, the usually reliable Costa or Whitbread Award let me down.

A quibble: it is curious why Kennedy chose Jane Russell and Jayne Mansfield as representative female icons of the day. Russell wasn't that well known during the war, and Mansfield didn't appear in movies until almost a decade later.

It's 1947 and Alfred Day, former WWII RAF gunner (and book shop worker), has signed on along with a bunch of other guys to work as an actor in a film about which he has firsthand knowledge: a POW camp. The details of his experiences with the other actors (many of whom were also in the war, some on the opposing side) are shared alternately with that of his life as a gunner and eventually prisoner. We learn about the formation of the crew (of which he played a part), his seven crewmates, a bit about some of the missions, his relationship with a woman he encounters in a bomb shelter, his love for his mother, hatred for his father, three significant deaths and the event leading to his capture. The diminutive (5' 4") Day, a man of few words but many thoughts, claims (p 8), "I've murdered and I stole and used big words, but I never smoked and I was a good boy." Most of the time, however, it seems like everything is kept intentionally vague. Little is learned about his crewmembers (save Pluckrose) beyond their names, and not much more about his mock-POW campmates, especially the creepy, secretive Vasyl. Same goes for his father, his mother, and Joyce, the object of his affections. Even with some great glimpses into the mind and life of Day, the underlying feeling is that the reader is being left too much in the dark. Better: Flyboys by James Bradley.

At a time when we're all sick of hearing about and seeing the consequences of war this is a book about war well worth reading. At 15 Alfred Day lies about his age and joins the RAF as a gunner to get away from his violent father and his small Midlands town that threatens a lack luster life and escapes to see the world or at least bomb it one target and mission at a time. The story is told in the third person with forays into the second person point of view and Alfie is reminiscing about his war as he plays an extra in a documentary about World War II.

This is the first book by A L Kennedy that I've read. She has one of the most unique and affecting voices I've read in quite some time. I found myself reading more slowly than usual and going back to re-read sections to understand better but also just because I wanted to taste them again. Alfie's war seemed very true to life and therefore heartbreaking.

5/5

The voice takes a bit of getting used to - its one of those books where you need to commit to reading reasonable chunks at a time or you won't get into the rhythm of the language or the stream of consciousness of the narrator. But when you do, its quite moving and the depiction of the close bonds of wartime air crews, really all acting as one organsism, is the best I've read. I thought it was a remarkable illustration of why, for some, war can create a sense of belonging and purpose and togetherness that the "real world" can struggle to match. To be honest I wasn't really convinced by the "love" component, couldn't really see what the protaganist's love interest saw in him. but none the less, I was glad that somebody saw something and there was some prospect of fulifllment and belonging outside of war

Overall, really very impressed, and I'll be trying to read some more of Kennedy's work

The book is mainly an exploration of the character of the protagonist, Alfie Day. It moves around from pre to mid to post WW II. Book contains a fair amount of stream of consciousness, mixed freely and expertly with plot.

As a result of its construction, the book requires slow, thorough reading, which led to its not being what I expected. A wonderful, really thought-provoking read that I highly recommend.

War is definitive. There's something about it that stands as the antithesis of basic humanity yet, in a strange way, also shapes human existence. It is within such a parenthesis -- the action and aftermath of WWII -- that Scottish writer, A. L. Kennedy, settles her newest novel, Day.

The story follows Alfred "Alfie" Day, a former RAF tail gunner who enlisted as a teenager, mostly to escape his violent, alcoholic father and victimized mother. The novel takes place, however, five years after the war has ended. Alfie, now in his mid-20s, is once again a volunteer, this time as an extra in a film about a German POW camp. the dark irony being that he actually was a POW for six months.

On the movie set, he begins to re-live his experiences of the war. In a series of often disorienting flashbacks, he recalls his close-knit flight crew, who were his only real family; reflects on his mother's death at his father's hands; and struggles with memories of Joyce, a married woman with whom he fell in love and had a tense, short-lived affair. Overall, the narrative is slippery and elusive, unsteadily shifting through time and place. The storyline repeatedly regresses to Alfie's days in the RAF, which defined his entire existence. His past is relayed incoherently in regard to the rest of the narrative, yet clearly affects the present: he is depressed, aloof, and hopelessly clinging to nostalgia for his now-dead flight crew, and his feelings for Joyce. As painful as these years were for him, the war gave him a purpose, and when it ended, so did any semblance of his life. He became lost.

It's easy to get lost in his story, as well. Kennedy blindly immerses readers into the narrative with little, if any, clues for place or time. The opening scene finds Alfie wandering a hillside in the company of a Ukrainian named Vasyl: "They'd left the path an age ago, Alfred hadn't noticed when, and there was no doubt that they were lost now, if they had ever known where to go. And that had been something of a pain, an irritation: on arriving in nowhere, having to stumble and tramp along on a track that divided and twisted and then abandoned them completely."

For several pages, the only clear facts are that Alfred has decided to grow a mustache, that he's short, rather homely, and that, these days, "mainly his problem is tiredness."

As the reader gropes for context, Kennedy complicates things further by employing a second-person narrative. It's a jarring technique that shows up with increasing frequency. Suddenly "you" are there, too, conflated into a single being with Alfie, sharing his thoughts: "You'd look in the mirror some mornings and wonder why it didn't show; the way most of you was always yelling to get out."

The reader, quite naturally, resists this invasion of personal space. The flaw lies in the fact that merging the reader with Alfie cannot ever be fully accomplished. Alfie's turmoil and depression are too uniquely his own. While it's possible to empathize with him to a point, it's foolhardy to expect the reader to embody him. But that's exactly what Kennedy seems to want.

The result is a separation from Alfie as a character. Because the reader is inside his thoughts, it's clearly not necessary for Kennedy to provide a full-bodied background for him. Thus, Alfie never quite takes complete form, which leads to little, if any, emotional connection to him. When Alfie, early on, reveals that he decided to kill his abusive father, the revelation falls flat because, for him, the deed is already done. And then, when the act finally takes place (in Alfie's memory), it's with a sense of dull detachment. He's simply hurling bricks at his drunk father in a slow-motion, dream-like fashion that's more lackluster than artistic.

Alfred lacks shape, definition, or even a reason for being. In fact, it's not his present life, but his flashbacks, which are the most vibrant part of the novel. Although the other characters seem, even more so than Alfie, like cardboard caricatures, Kennedy succeeds at least in hinting at a parade of personalities. Her crowning accomplishment is that she effortlessly conveys daily life for 1940s RAF airmen as if she's writing from experience. In addition, the dialogue and interaction between the flight crew, for the most part, is superbly done. It's unfortunate, though, that Kennedy's obvious talents do not extend to character development.

There's something off about Joyce, not to mention her relationship with Alfie. They have no chemistry and no passion: in fact, they barely even seem to talk. Worse yet, Alfie is such a two-dimensional character that it's remarkable Joyce has any feelings for him, at all.

Speaking of feelings, little in this novel is inspiring or even rousing. It could have been wrenching; it could have been hauntingly evocative, or, at the very least, somewhat sentimental. Instead, it's 288 pages filled with the shallow remembrances of a forgettable, "ordinary" man. There is little in Alfie worth pursuing; there is nothing to make the reader willingly accept him as a combined "you," and at the end of the day, when it comes to Alfred Day, it's even a struggle to keep reading.