03 February 2008

New fiction: The winds of war

Jan 24th 2008 From The Economist print edition

WERE it not for the author's photo on the jacket, few would guess that this war story was written by a woman. The details of RAF bombing missions over Germany are scrupulous. More impressive still, A.L. Kennedy has a keen feel for the jousting indirection of male banter. She skilfully depicts the discontinuity between the bursting emotions of men's interior life and the choked, inarticulate bleating that expresses them—or fails to. “Day” was published in Britain last year and well deserved to win the 2007 Costa book of the year award, announced this week. The novel has just come out in America.

Young and working class, Alfie Day is attached to his mother and fears he will no longer be able to protect her from his violent father when he enlists. Nevertheless, with suicidal bravado, he volunteers as a tail gunner. The countdown to flying the 30 missions that will complete his service to the crown recollects the same countdown in Joseph Heller's “Catch-22”: a race between luck and doom. Likewise, in portraying the airmen's distinctively intimate bond, “Day” is in some ways “Catch-22” with the humour removed. But then, both authors would concur that their central material isn't funny.

While on leave Alfie falls in love with a young woman in London. She is already married to a serviceman away at war. And it is a discipline not to permit himself the fantasy that he will survive to claim his small patch of ordinary happiness (perhaps too that the husband will not), when fantasising about surviving to next week seems an indulgence. Sure enough, on mission number 26 Alfie's bomber is downed. His comrades perish, and Alfie becomes a German prisoner of war.

Providing the novel with its sophisticated texture, the story alternates between war and the parody of war—in this case the set of a mocked-up POW camp, where Alfie is performing as an extra in a film five years after the armistice. Keeping track of these time shifts takes concentration, since the author will sometimes deliberately blur the line between war as grand drama and war as farce.

Ms Kennedy manages to make every battle truism fresh—in particular, the cliché about how “you never feel so alive”. Yet in rendering the guilt, numbness and bewilderment of its aftermath, she also kills off any foolish temptation to envy the intensity of warfare.