Wednesday, January 9, 2008 (SF Chronicle)
Review: Inside the rattled mind of a British World War II vet
Martin Rubin
Day By A.L. Kennedy KNOPF; 274 PAGES; $24
Born in 1965, the British writer A.L. Kennedy is known for her vigorous imagination and her unusual and highly original use of language. Both are on display in “Day,” which takes its spare title from the last name of the novel’s protagonist, a former Royal Air Force gunner who spent time in a Nazi prisoner of war camp after his aircraft crashed. Now, four years after his release at war’s end, he decides to serve as an extra in a film about POWs being made in Germany.
Alfred Day was still a young lad when he left his abusive father and beloved mother – to say nothing of a stinking job gutting fish – to volunteer for the air force. His experience there was one of the two highlights of his life – the other was Joyce, the married woman he met and loved during the war – and he hopes to recapture on the film set some of the male bonding and camaraderie he experienced in actual service.
What happens instead is the eruption of all sorts of confusing emotions: “It had seemed not unlikely that he could work out his own little pantomime inside the professional pretence and tunnel right through to the place where he’d lost himself, or rather the dark, the numb gap he could tell was asleep inside him. Something else had been there once, but he couldn’t think what. He was almost sure it had come adrift in Germany, in the real prison, in ’43, or thereabouts. So it could possibly make sense that he’d turn up here and at least work out what was missing, maybe even put it back.” . . . .
—To read the full review, click here or visit www.sfgate.com and search on Martin Rubin.