One Day

‘One Day’ by David Nicholls won the Sainsbury’s Popular Fiction prize at the Galaxy National Book Awards last week. I’ve mentioned this book in passing a couple of times on this blog since I read it in the summer.

I’ve found the book interesting for a number of reasons. It has quite an interesting cover and this is also plastered with all sorts of endorsements which largely serve to position it in the market: ‘big, absorbing, smart’ (Nick Hornby); ‘incredibly moving’ (Marian Keyes); ‘totally brilliant’ (Tony Parsons); ‘fantastic Labour boom years comedy’ (the Guardian) (although less than half the relationship occurs under Blair); ‘you really do put the book down with the hallucinatory feeling that they’ve become as well known to you as your closest friends’ (Jonathan Coe). That’s just the covers, there’s plenty more epithets in the first two pages inside.

One clever thing about having these quotations on the cover is that it makes it look like a film poster. And the book is very cinematic — so much so that a film is already in production. (The author wrote some of one of the series of ‘Cold Feet’ — and this book has many echoes of that TV series.)

These endorsements are very accurate as they position the book into a sweet spot that sits between the lad-lit of Parsons and Hornby, chick-lit with a dark touch of Keyes and the modern comedy of Coe — and with a ‘bit of politics’ thrown in by the Guardian. And that’s exactly the genre — a funny book written by a man that also appeals very much to women. A look at the 262 (at time of blogging) 5 star reviews on Amazon appears to show they are predominantly penned by female names (although, of course, women do read more book than men overall).

I have a feeling that this book is significant because this genre may well be something of a new phenomenon — non-gender specific and a synthesis of lad-lit and chick-lit — whereas previously these commercial social comedy novels have tended to have been aimed at either gender. Again, the cover is significant — two silhouettes — each of a man and a woman. I has the mark of very careful marketing as if the publishers had taken a punt on a book that didn’t ‘fit’ directly into any neat category. And, if so, I’m very glad this has worked because one of the other reasons I bought and read the book is because it seemed to fit the genre I’m writing in.

The book follows two characters, Dexter and Emma, and switches between their points of view. However, my reading is that Emma is the character the author is most attached to, as I find her more realistically drawn and complex (but that might be my male POV). And I think this may tap into something mentioned by Graeme A. Thomson in his analysis of Kate Bush that I blogged on a few months ago — an innate curiosity about how the other half feels (either as intimate lover or as gender in general). I’ve noticed recently in women’s magazines how they often have a ‘typical’ man writing a column that is meant to give the readers some idea of a male perspective on an issue (although I’ve been fairly infuriated by the views of most of these supposed representative men in the few I’ve read). But I think that Nicholls has shown there’s quite a sizable market for novels written by men that perhaps don’t achieve the ultimate insight of providing an authentically female point-of-view (although if you want that authenticity then there’s plenty of female writers to pick from) but are actually more interesting and enlightening by presenting a sympathetic interpretation of what a male author considers to be a female perspective.

Actually I find that women writers are a lot less neurotic about writing from a male point-of-view — they just get on with it — but perhaps that’s maybe because they’re less likely to be challenged over its authenticity by men.

Going back to the Amazon reviews, I’m not sure if I’ve seen a novel like this that has polarised opinions so much — not so much in the star ratings but in the comments that accompany them. Many of the five star reviews say it’s one of the reader’s favourite ever books while the one-star reviewers completely damn it on many different aspects, predominantly technical.

Having come out of the City University course where I’d spent six months reading other students’ writing with a very critical eye, I’ve started to read published novels with the same perspective and, in many, I have a mental pencil which strikes out words and makes notional comments in the margins.

Reading ‘One Day’ was oddly both infuriating and quite affirming because there were passages where I thought ‘if I’d have brought that to the City workshops I’d be slagged off mercilessly’. There were the dreaded adverbs (particularly hated when applied at the end of speech tags), long passages of dialogue where despite it being between two characters (male and female) it became unclear who was speaking, some occasionally very stilted dialogue (Dexter’s mother) and in some passages the POV kept leaping all over the place (sometimes within the same paragraph) — although there were amusing occasions when I was reminded of Douglas Adams when the POV suddenly switched to a minor character.

Also, and I’ll try not to spoil the story, there’s a massive twist to the plot that relies completely on a co-incidental, totally random event — which is something all the how-to advice tells writers never to do because the plot should derive from character. However, I actually liked that twist because it was genuinely surprising and it does throw the reader — I’m not sure that it helps the remainder of the book that much but it did pack an emotional punch and that part was well-written.

Having finished and reflected on the book, I think that all of the above are perhaps why readers like it — it’s not too perfect, the imperfections perhaps bring the reader closer to the characters in an informal way. And also it shows that many creative writing class shibboleths are quite over-pedantic anyway.

I liked the book even though the characters aren’t particularly likeable — often people will criticise books by saying they need to ‘like’ the characters — but I’m not sure whether this is mainly a defensive reaction that a reader likes to use to make a statement about how they’d like to be perceived themselves.

Overall, the book succeeds because it does something that, in my experience, creative writing courses fail to emphasise — perhaps because it’s so fundamental — it makes the reader want to know what happened next. By taking a clever device of basing the action every day on 15th July from 1988 to 2007, Nicholls has (most of) the readers hooked — and it’s a life experience saga too — the characters will be just about 40 by the end of the period.

Almost all popular fiction (which is the category of award ‘One Day’ won) succeeds because readers want to find out what happened next. I find it quite odd sometimes when someone writes on my drafts (‘looking forward to what happens next time’ or ‘always like yours as it has me turning the pages’) because sometimes it seems like the readers have more interest in the events in the story than you do as a writer (perhaps because you have the burden of inventing them?) but in a workshopping session one is more likely to be praised to the skies for a nice sounding phrase or a piece of imagery.

It’s good to have this counterbalanced every so often by reading warm and funny novels like ‘One Day’ and also appreciate the genuineness of many readers’ reaction to it — and good that there are awards that recognise this too.

I also liked the use of pop music in the book too. The book’s website had a lovely feature where it listed the tracks Emma had put on compilation tapes to give to Dexter. I e-mailed the author to discuss the relative absence of Smiths’ tracks and he was a nice enough chap to send me a quick reply on the subject.

Historical Fiction

I missed Monday’s class this week on historical fiction so I’ll post a few thoughts here. These apply to modern writers setting novels in the past rather than looking at historical books set in their contemporary time. However, I’m aware that writers such as Dickens, Hardy and (I think) Austen sometimes set their novels in a historical context (e.g. writing about events in 1820 in 1860 and so on, which isn’t that much different from modern writers setting novels in the second world war or sixties or whatever). I’m not really a big reader of historical fiction. However, I can see why it appeals to many readers. When we were asked on the first day of the course what we thought made a good read more than one person said it was escapism and being transported to another world — and that’s what well-written historical fiction should do. This also puts a responsibility on the writer to create a plausible and credible historical world and seems to me to add an extra dimension to the reader’s willingness to suspend disbelief. One concern that I worry would preoccupy me if I was to write historical fiction would be to unwittingly introduce historical inaccuracies which I would think would break the reader’s suspension of disbelief. I guess in practice that readers do not expect complete historical verisimilitude. There will always be compromises between historical accuracy and communicating effectively to a modern audience — one obvious one is the way language and conversation change over a period of years. A writer probably has sufficient resources to accurately recreate language dating back for about 400 years (from Shakespeare onwards) but a mass readership would probably find this wearing and the use of modern vernacular is probably more practical. Paradoxically most care probably needs to be taken with vocabulary and diction of the more recent past — many common modern figures of speech are quite recent, although many others are centuries old. Clearly good reference material would be essential. The historical writer will also need to do considerable research about the world they are trying to recreate — historical events, social upheavals and changes in response to inventions and innovations (e.g. agricultural and industrial revolutions). Some periods are more interesting than others. I remember someone on an Open University course writing a novel about a blacksmith in 13th century England and he also tried to authentically recreate the speech of the time. I thought the combination of the two was pretty ambitious. In normally set my own writing in the present or fairly recent past — partly because I feel I want to write and comment on the present but also don’t fancy putting in all the time and effort to research a historical setting. However, in the novel I’m currently working on I realised that I wanted to give a character a backstory so I decided to write a couple of chapters in flashback. I took a specific date — June 1995 — which I think came to me quite subconsciously. It was the time when John Major suddenly stood for re-election as leader of his party. My character was the wife of a prospective politician and I used the historical event as both scene-setting detail and also to show her husband’s obsession with politics (and emotional neglect of his wife). I surprised myself by really enjoying the historical research (the period co-incided with the beginnings of the web so I could look up newspaper stories from the time online). I’m now thinking of doing the same with another character and going back a shorter time — to the Iraq war protests. So maybe I’d like writing historical fiction more than I thought? As regards an example of a historical novel, I bought ‘Wolf Hall’ by Hilary Mantel. I’ve not had time to read it yet but I’ve had a look through it and noted a few things. As is mentioned in reviews, she uses the present tense to convey a sense of immediacy. The prose is also vivid and sensuous — the opening chapter evokes feelings of pain and smell is mentioned several times. The narration and dialogue are also written in a modern idiom. I thought she borrowed some techniques from film (as some modern writers consciously do): there is even a cast list at the start of the book organised by historical context; the chapters are captioned in filmic style with the year of the action and sometimes the location. This book is also quite clever in the way it’s marketed — a revisionist view of Thomas Cromwell — which means that readers can feel they are engaging in a self-improving, earnest, intellectual discussion as well as having a good read. Mike