Bookclub: David Nicholls - One Day

Editor's note: This programme is available to listen to online and to download.

What is it about David Nicholls? He has a way of telling stories that attracts readers like flies to a honeypot: once they have a taste, they can’t stay away. Talking to him about his novel One Day  for this month’s Bookclub, he said this: ‘I like this idea – that there’s no such thing as an ordinary day. I like the challenge of making often mundane days full of event and full of significance and full of intrigue.’ In pursuing that thought he opts, quite deliberately, for a narrative that seems to promise – well predictability, even tedium. In the case of this book, a love story told over 22 years by recounting the happenings on the same day each year – July 15th, the day that Emma and Dexter graduated from Edinburgh University in 1988. The question that underpins the story is one of the oldest and most appealing of all – will they ever get together? It’s as simple as that.

Naturally, the reason that the question stays interesting is that Dexter and Emma are characters who can hold our attention. Dexter intrigued our readers. The first questioner said she found him ‘alternately attractive, frustrating, awful and then vulnerable’. Emma, on the other hand, is a little more obviously likeable. But she’s a character who perhaps reveals more hidden depths. David Nicholls made the point that when he was trying to be an actor (he’s been a much more successful writer) he remembers the slightly outrageous side of the 1990s, the arrogant laddishness that was one of the habits of the age, the kind of vanity that Dexter develops in his twenties. So we’re intrigued by Emma, trying to probe underneath, but as far as Dexter is concerned we’re caught between wanting him to be taken down a peg or two and wanting to see him grow up. As David puts it: ‘There is a decency at the heart of it, and he changes through the course of the novel much more than Emma. It’s really his redemption, the novel.’

As someone who lives part of my life in Edinburgh, I naturally warmed to the background to One Day at the university there. David catches well the atmosphere of a city that he describes as ‘beautiful, romantic and not twee’ in which traces of a bohemian life can still sit comfortably with its character, caught between the Georgian grandeur of the New Town and the rumbustious past that’s always there in the old streets and tenements that take you back to Edinburgh in an earlier time. To be crude about it, David said, you could see Emma as old town and Dexter as new. They’re the ying and yang of Auld Reekie.

The structure of the story – that glimpse of their lives on the same day in each year – means inevitably that fate is always stalking the two characters. How will they meet? Will there be another chance encounter? Will an incident from the past bring them together? I was therefore, intrigued, although not altogether surprised that David revealed his love of Thomas Hardy, who turned coincidence and fate into a method of story-telling. Indeed, he said the idea of this tory came from a passage in Tess of the d’Urbervilles which he read when he was 17. ‘It blew me away.’

And what was the passage?

‘I can’t say because it would give the story away.’ I’ll leave you to guess.

The point is that he’s fascinated by fate. And the choice of July 15th- St Swithin’s Day - as the One Day that we’d see Emma and Dexter down the years is a nice touch – ‘because the whole thing about St Swithin’s Day is that it’s a whole attempt to predict the unpredictable. The desire we have to know the future seems very compelling.’

And that, of course, is why he keeps making us turn the next page.

David Nicholls on Bookclub this Sunday 6 September at 16.00 and Thursday 10 September at 15.30