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I like Glasgow, so it was fun to get some readers together in the Mitchell Library there to meet A.L. Kennedy. (Radio 4’s Bookclub, this Sunday 1 March at 4pm, next Thursday 5 March also at 4pm and on the iPlayer too).
And part of the enjoyment was in seeing the library. It's a grand Edwardian building - containing the biggest reference library in Europe - but what was striking about it was the life going on in the newly-refurbished rooms: full of people who were using the place to read or research or just prowl. At a time when some local authorities are running down their library services (on the wholly spurious grounds that the internet has somehow made them less necessary) it's good to remember how many libraries are alive and prospering. We had a great time. Part of the reason was that Alison Kennedy likes audiences. For the last few years she's developed a sideline as a stand-up comedian: she's now a regular fixture on the Edinburgh Fringe in the summer.
Not surprisingly, our readers - with a healthy span in age I'm glad to say, found themselves engaged immediately in an encounter that was funny and provocative as well as wise. We were talking about ‘Day’, her novel which won the 2007 Costa Book Award and has become something of a contemporary classic. It's the story of Alfred Day, a tail gunner on World War II bombers whose story is told in a series of flashbacks (actually, it's a little more complicated than that... but never mind) from a starting point on the German-Polish border in 1949. He's gone back to take part in a film. The idea came to Alison from The Wooden Horse, which all of us of a certain age remember so well, in which the prisoners of war dug their tunnels under the cover of the exercise horse, the story told in Eric Williams's book set in Stalag Luft III. In ‘Day’, we're taken on a journey into the past of our anti-hero where the horrors of his family sometimes seem as awful as the war itself : it was torn apart by murder, and the RAF become a kind of substitute for him, where he could find warmth and comradeship, even in circumstances where they had to learn to live with death every day. A.L. Kennedy recalled that when a parachute failed to open and someone dropped like a stone the airmen would call it "jumping to a conclusion".
Having had the idea, she spent a great time of time in research into the life of the bomber crews, sitting in Lancasters and touching their equipment, imagining what it must have been like to take off for the slow runs across Europe, through the anti-aircraft fire, to drop the bombs. Before she finished the book, she told us, she was giving a reading in Hamburg and was approached by several old soldiers in the audience who remembered the British bombing of their city (it was flattened) and spoke movingly to her about their experience of war, one that of course had many similarities with Day's own. In filling out his character, weaving his story, she used a good deal of her own background. She had grandparents from Staffordshire, and she remembered the rich dialect of the west Midlands, with words that conjured up for her a pattern of family reminiscences, just as they placed Day in his community, his era and his class.
She is unashamedly anti-war (in recent years she's been drawn to the Quakers), but thinks that World War II was the closest thing to a righteous war that she can imagine. In any case, she's moved by the idea of a 'citizen army' and recognises the bravery and decency that it's involved. But in Day's story she probes the other stories from that time: how the awfulness of danger and destruction was accompanied by the knowledge that war gave some people - at home and in the forces - the time of their lives, that would stay with them for ever and perhaps define everything that followed. It was certainly true of Day, who's not an entirely likeable character at all, but who carries with him so many of the ambiguities of war.
I hope you enjoy the programme. It was a good-natured, sharp-witted affair and a refreshing afternoon in Glasgow. As always in that city, the readers were direct: someone confessed, just after we had begun, that he had taken a long time to get into it because of the difficulties of the narrative construction and wondered if Alison worried about people not being able to cope with it. In response she told a story about giving a reading in Stockholm at which a reader approached her and asked for an encouraging message in the book. Aha, thought the author, I'm her guru and she wants something uplifting from me. But no, the reader had tried to get through the book three times already, and had given up.
I hope you're enjoying ‘Day’. It's worth every minute. You will certainly enjoy A. L. Kennedy.
Next month it's poetry. Andrew Motion steps down as Poet Laureate in May and we'll be talking to him about his own poetry, the strains of writing for public events and why poetry matters.
Happy reading.
Jim
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