Disappointing
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This book has received all sorts of rave reviews and I looked forward to reading it. Unfortunately I found it to be very disappointing. Its disjointed style just didn't hold my attention at all and it was a struggle to get through even though it is quite a small book.
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A blemished tour de force
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With "Day" Miss Kennedy joins the distinguished group of women writers who describe actual combat in war. Brilliantly written, the underlying obsession is not war as such, but Miss Kennedy's own inner demons. An over-elaborate plot spoils the narrative.
"Day" is well researched, and wears its erudition lightly. The central character is realised in the round, and is attended by a large number of subsidiary characters. These are 2-dimensional, giving the book an empty, surreal quality. Miss K is good on wartime RAF slang and wartime RAF jokes, memorably so. Unfortunately this type of humour drives out her own personal brand of excoriating wit, which is less in evidence in "Day" than in any of her books so far. The focus on war-time horror slips far too frequently onto more gratuitous acts of violence.
As an anti-War book "Day" does not quite cut the mustard. Miss Kennedy's moral eye is squinting. The bombing of Hamburg is equated with the extermination of Jewish villagers by their Ukranian neighbours. Random acts of violence, including grievous bodily harm and parricide, are treated as adventitious. Miss Kennedy's moral indignation leads nowhere. The constant shifting of focus between place and time gives the story depth but is wearisome. The love interest is unconvincing, its emphasis on physicality leaving a vacuum at its heart.
Altogether "Day" reinforces the impression that Miss Kennedy is a wayward genius who is always worth reading but who never quite manages to get her act together, a short story writer rather than a novelist. Maddening.
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Stunning
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I can't say this is an easy book to read and it took me some time to get into the style of writing. Basically many strands of Day's life are intertwined; past, present and future. This means you initially have to work to keep up and make sense of it. When I'd got that sorted I found the depth of the book and the writing breathtaking.
I admire books that encompass the human condition and this is certainly one of them.
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A very good read
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This is not an easy novel and it is easy to be put off by the style but perseverance does bring its rewards. Unlike a number of the reviewers here I found this book gripping. I also found its voice to ring true which is a considerable achievement bearing in mind the writer, the main character and the era it portrays.
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Irritating character + irritating style = irritatating novel
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There's a pretty good story in here somewhere. Day is an ex-gunner who's now taking part in a film in 1949. Only trouble is, he keeps flashing back to his time druing the real war. That's bad news for the reader as it's sometimes hard to tell what is the film and what is the war. If that weren't bad enough, he's a very irritating character; I found it impossible to sympathise with him, and his wartime cronies didn't come across as real at all. In addition to these problems the novel is filled with monologues and stream-of-consiousness stuff from Day's head, and that is even more irritating. (I wonder if I can just say this is arty pretentious piffle?)
The actual story of the wartime bombing raids could have been interesting in the hands of someone happy to tell a tale and not bury it under an obscure style that, these days, seems guaranteed to win an award. A real hard slog, and it wasn't really worth the trouble.
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