AL Kennedy on Day (ONLINE VERSION!!!!!)

AL Kennedy has a secret: "I am trying, desperately trying, to get to write Doctor Who," she says. "To hell with the novels! It's so hard to get that gig…" I put this at the start of this piece for no other reason than to get Russell T Davies' attention should he happen to be reading The Skinny this month.

A shame if she gave up the novels though, because her latest, Day, is extremely accomplished and a great read. Set during World War Two and its aftermath, the main character is one Alfred Day, once a tail gunner in a Lancaster bomber and then a Prisoner of War. At the start of the novel he's back in a POW camp, but one that's been recreated for a film. We are party to the memories this naturally brings back, and so the book moves between a movie war and the actual war. "It's dictated by how he thinks and every time he's in the prison camp somebody kicks him off to somewhere else" says Kennedy. Admittedly the flow of Day's mind is complicated, and the book heavy reading at first. However, we're soon drawn in to Day's thought patterns – or should that be Kennedy's writing? With a little work on the reader's part this initial difficulty gives way to an engrossing character portrait – and one that's never the sort of lazily predictable war tale so many authors write. "If I'm having a really shit day I end up writing bad pastiche AL Kennedy" she says. "Then I just have to go for a walk and not bother. If I'm aware of style I change it." This approach to writing is very suitable when dealing with what could have seemed very familiar material.

As readers, we can't help but respect Day's odd decision to relive the war on a set, if not quite understand it. "There's a kind of sense that he's going back because it's taken a bit of him that he's going to take back" the author says. So we follow Day as he relives the war to get back whatever he has lost, and in the process we get to see what happened.
This structure was, unusually, inspired by a throwaway line in a Picture Post article. It was about the making of the war film The Wooden Horse. "Since some of the extras are former POWs they did this whole demonstration about how they started off the tunnelling. And this article just had a wee throwaway line where he said, 'And the digging has continued and nobody knows how far it's gone'." The author of this piece was a POW, and as Kennedy says "he's kind of very quietly just saying that it's weird to be back there and to be feeling at home somewhere that you hated." Day is part of a close-knit bomber crew from various different backgrounds, which at times can make the book feel like a superior war movie.

Film did have an influence on the book, and Kennedy mentions particularly "a Dirk Bogarde film called Appointment in London which was made just after the war but by people who were very involved. It was hailed at the time as being one of the most accurate war films that had ever come out. The footage at the end is genuine film that they took on a mission." She also appreciatively mentions the documentary film, Target For Tonight, but is rather more scathing about The Great Escape: "it just annoys me so much now. Such an inaccurate film. And such an important breakout and people died and they made that into this terrible film full of nonsense." She did other research of course, reading extensively and actually boarding a semi-working Lancaster, "a very good machine, it was very resilient and could fly on only one engine, or full of holes, but it was really hard to get out of". It was a death trap. The amount of information available on World War Two is overwhelming, and the book filled Kennedy's thoughts: "You have to keep it all running in your head, and it was like being really close to somebody who's very upset for a year, and there's nothing you can do about it except write down why they're upset until it stops." This dictates the tone of the novel, which shows men under near constant pressure. Kennedy's prose brings this home to us constantly in subtle ways, such as when she notes in passing that Day "felt the slight metallic resistance that always seemed to lean against him when he turned and knew he was facing Europe."

Tension permeates the book. Even during leave periods in Britain, the crew know they might have to go back at any given moment. Day has an affair with a married woman, but this is motivated as much by release from tension as feeling. "Because everybody potentially could be dead in hours there was a fair amount of people having sex" the author says. "There were a lot of strange relationships, intense relationships and brief relationships, people becoming prostitutes who'd never have dreamed of becoming prostitutes. There's lots of very strange behaviour when everybody, the entire population, is totally stressed." And the trick Kennedy pulls off is to make all of this stressed behaviour somehow seem appropriate.
The aircrew that must periodically face extreme danger, face their stress in strange ways too. A perfect example of this is when the crew play cricket in the dark to acclimatise their eyesight, which is one way to "practice hitting a black thing in a big black space" says Kennedy… "When you're moving and everything else is black and people might be shooting at you," she continues… "and frankly if you shoot at them without hitting them you give yourself away because you're firing tracer bullets which are a dotted line straight back to you." Obviously, even with the practice, a rear gunner had a perilous job, and the tension is apparent. Apparent danger aside though, there are further reasons to write about bombers. "I definitely wanted to write about bombing because the idea of bombing a civilian population is this grand obsession that we still have. Didn't work in Vietnam, didn't work in Korea…" and guess where else it didn't work?

AL Kennedy was (and is) a vocal opponent of the war in Iraq, and this did influence Day. "I know loads of people are doing books about the war, but loads of people might not be in the position that I was, going to anti-war demonstrations just before it broke out or writing stuff and you just have a head full of war for about three months," says the author, adding that the mass protesting was "to no result," then continuing, "well it might have delayed it a bit… which, considering our kill rate, has probably saved quite a few people." It's a bleak sort of positive, but it's the only sort to be found in war.

Day does reach a happy ending of a sort, or rather, Kennedy somehow manages to leave him at an upswing. "The art of the happy ending," she says, "is to stop just before it gets shit again. I think it would have been an intolerable book otherwise." A brilliantly crafted intolerable book though. The book is extremely dark in places, but astonishingly ends on just the right note of slight, glimpsed, hope - Doctor Who doesn't know what he's missing.