Day (2007)

A. L. Kennedy's Day is pretty good. Which means it is better than that, and it is up to me to say why. 

Day is not an easy read. Not because it deals with the trauma of war, but because it doesn't do so in a linear expository fashion, where we follow a subject who, if in the first-person, shows us through a chronological succession of events how difficult it is to cope with post-war life -- or if in the foreboding third-person (Does he die in the end?), is shown to be showing us, with the help of omnipotent narration.

Which this book is. In the third-person. Its hero Alfred Day more or less playing himself as a triggered extra in a late-1940s German war film set in a Nazi prisoner of war camp similar to the one he was held in after the Lancaster bomber he helped to crew (he was a tail-gunner) was shot down.

In her Guardian review, the never-more-popular-than-she-is-today Ursula K Le Guin was less than generous with the interior ("claustrophobic") nature of this book, which swirls around in Day's head between calls of Action! and the inevitable bouts of downtime that attend extra work. At one point Day faints during an outdoor inspection scene, and the director is so inspired he decides to use it in the film, passing over Day for a more experienced extra. Shades of Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1961) here, but also a gyroscopic prose style we don't see much of anymore, and one wonders if we have Le Guin to thank for that too.

So much of what is being published these days is concerned with trauma and its cousin, grief. And since the war in Ukraine has stayed so high in the news cycle, it might be a good time to republish this book in a new edition, perhaps with a Foreword by someone who came back from that war to remind us how trauma affects its own form, and how restorative it is to read it.