David
Nicholl’s debut novel, Starter for Ten, was a big success
and was later made into a film. His second, The Understudy, was a
relatively low-key affair. A friend read Starter for Ten and opined that
Nicholls ‘can write’, but there is ‘no substance in the book’. I thought I would read Starter
for Ten (along with Victoria Hislop’s The Island), if I went on a
holiday. Which I haven't done this year. Then I read One Day, David Nicholls’s third novel.
Why did I buy One Day instead of reading Starter for Ten which I already had in my collection? What can I say? I like to be unpredictable.
Through
a series of snapshots of a day—15th July, the St Swithin’s day, to
be exact—repeated at yearly intervals over two decades, starting from 1988, One
Day traces the lives of two
friends— Emma Morley and Dexter Meyhew. The two meet on the graduation day at
Edinburgh University where they had spent the previous four years. Emma had noticed
and liked the handsome Dexter ever since she saw him at a party in her first
year at the University, but had had not done anything about it because she did not want to risk being spurned by Dexter who she suspects is posh and therefore in a different league. Emma has a
working class background and speaks with such pronounced Northern accent that
some of her university acquaintances think it is an affectation, their
misconception strengthened by Emma’s socio-political views which are to the
left of Lenin. She is the sort of girl who regards ‘bourgeois’ as a term of
abuse, reads Unbearable Lightness of
Being, and has photographs of Nelson Mandela and Che Guevara adorning the
walls of her room. Dexter, who indeed comes from a very comfortable middle
class background, has little reason to take notice of Emma, surrounded as he is
by a bevy of girls who are only too keen to wrap themselves around him like
Union Jack. He finally notices Emma—despite her attempts to spoil her good
looks by intimidating spectacles—at the graduation ceremony, and the two spend
the night in her room, ‘cuddling’ and ‘kissing’, and speculating what might
they do with the rest of their lives. Dexter is taking a gap year—the
obligatory rite of passage for the children of affluent parents—so that he can
find himself in countries like India and Thailand. Beyond that he has no idea
of what he is going to do other than a vague notion that he wants to be
successful, make his parents proud and sleep with more than one woman at the
same time. Emma entertains the romantic notion of being courageous, making a
difference and changing lives through maybe art, and writing beautifully
(Awwww). Neither, on this last night as students, is under the illusion that
they will see much of the other over the years, although neither has the
stomach to actually say so. Emma would like to see more of Dexter but knows she
wouldn’t (not being in the same league and all that), and attempts to get over
her disappointment by making repeated barbed witze at Dexter’s affluent background.
The
story then takes a leap in time and we meet Emma and Dexter a year later, on
the same day. They have kept in touch. (They would, wouldn’t they? How would
the story progress, otherwise?) Dexter is in his gap year, travelling through
Asia, and Emma is touring with an experimental theatre company, having decided
to try out acting as her vocation, even though she is nagged all the time by
the suspicion that she does not have the requisite talent. Upon his return to
England, Dexter embarks on what appears to be a successful media career as a
late night television presenter of outré programmes, and, as was his ambition,
sleeps his way through a cavalcade of women with nice legs and terrific
breasts. Emma, in the meanwhile, lurches from one soul-destroying job to
another, before becoming a teacher of English (the triple A’s came handy after
all) and drama in a secondary comprehensive in London. Both are in
relationships that, in the words of relationship counsellors, have serious
issues. Dexter is with his television co-presenter, a loud girl for whom
‘bubbliness is a way of life verging on a disorder’, while Emma starts seeing a
man who was a fellow-waiter when she worked in a Tex-Mex, and whose face
reminds her of ‘tractors’. The man, Ian, has the ambition to become a stand-up
comedian and Emma simply does not have the heart to tell him that he is
terrible at it. Emma and Dexter continue to meet dutifully, increasingly
feeling that they have little left in common. Dexter, whose career is taking a
downward trajectory—hastened by his willingness to snort cocaine by the
garden-hose and consume alcohol in quantities that would render a man of
average weight and height comatose—even if he does not know it, finds himself
getting increasingly irked by Emma’s sardonic humour. He concludes that the
chip on her shoulder—at not having achieved much in career despite triple A’s
at university—has mutated into a millstone. Emma, on her part, sees what Dexter
refuses to accept what he has become: unpleasant, inconsiderate and on a fast
train to endsville. Things come to a head between them during one of their
increasingly cantankerous meetings, and Emma, unable to bear any longer
Dexter’s demeanour that suggests (to her) that he would rather be somewhere
else than be with her, walks away from their friendship. Neither has much luck in their relationships.
The bubbly television presenter, on her way to the P list of celebrities,
wisely concludes that Dexter, headed in the opposite direction, is past his
sell-by-date and replaces him with an upgraded version. Emma finds escape from
Ian’s awful jokes into the waiting arms of the principal of the comprehensive
she works in (who seems so sexually fixated on her that you think he surely
qualifies as a stalker but for the fact that the stalkee has got into his
bed—metaphorically so to speak, they have sex in his office—of her own accord),
and carries a two-year affair with him that is marked principally by lack of
affection.
Over
the next few years, Emma and Dexter meet occasionally, mostly at the wedding
receptions of their university friends; and are cordial, civil and distant to
each other. Dexter starts another relationship; this time with a career woman
named Sylphie who talks and behaves like an agent of some alien species programmed
to look and behave like humans; into the bargain she has awful petit bourgeois
parents who think Dexter is a waste of space.
Dexter and Sylphie marry in due course and have a daughter. Dexter
accepts that his television career is more difficult to revive than arouse
Lazarus, and, heeding Sylphie’s sensible advice, gets a job offered by his
flatmate from his university days who has become some sort of business magnate
and is opening sandwich bars all over the place. Emma too takes several decisions,
each one the motivational gurus and Life-coaches would describe as
life-changing. She asks the unfunny Ian (to whom she in any case is not
faithful) to sod off; she tells the sex-fiend of a principal to find someone
else he can get carpet burns with; and resigns her job in the school. And
becomes a free-lance writer—writing teenage fiction, drawing her own
illustrations. After a lot of struggle and several rejections she finds a
publisher and, to her pleasant surprise, her witty novel chronicling the
adventures of her teenage heroine becomes successful, paving way—Harry Potter
style—to several more installations. Things do not turn out that well for
Dexter. While he is sampling sandwiches for his university friend and employer,
he (the employer) is sampling Sylphie’s buns. The marriage ends after Sylphie
walks out on Dexter, taking their daughter with her. Dexter is distraught and
even the knowledge that his ex-parents-in-law dislike Sylphie’s new partner
even more than they disliked him is not enough to console the inconsolable
cuckold. Riper opportunity will not present itself to the two estranged friends
to reconcile, and that’s what happens. Emma and Dexter make up. They go a step
further and do something which Emma has thought about from time to time right
from their university days, but Dexter hasn’t until recently: they start a
relationship. In the last part of the novel we find Emma and Dexter settling
into a sedate, affectionate relationship—she writes her teenage best-seller
while he opens a café that is moderately successful. Surely nothing will go
wrong for the two friends now. And then something unforeseen happens.
One Day is one of those novels
that are absorbing, funny, sharply observed, wise, heart-warming, moving,
and—for all these reasons—terrific reads. Starting in the Thatcher years, the
novel traces, via its two protagonists, the lives led by millions in the Labour
boom years. Mind, there is not a lot of politics in the novel; in fact, despite
Emma’s intermittent hand-wringing at not being faithful to teenage socialist /
left wing principles, there is hardly any. Similarly, despite an occasional nod
to the flashbulb events such as the famous Labour victory of 1997 and the July
2005 bombings of the London underground, the socio-politico-cultural events of
these decades form, at most, a blurred background. It is therefore all the more
striking that the novel so succinctly captures the zeitgeist of those times. One
Day is a remarkable social novel.
Nicholls
takes great care in developing the characters of the two protagonists. Emma
Morley and Dexter Mayhew are totally believable, solid, well rounded
characters. They have their foibles and are capable of causing hurt; they are
also capable of genuine kindness. As the novel progresses, you find yourself
warming up to them, getting engrossed in their lives, rejoicing in their
success, and, when the end comes, they stay in your mind for a long time. Not
many novels can do this. Emma Morley, in particular, is a memorable character. One
Day is a deeply sentimental novel, but not once does Nicholls take
recourse to cloying sentimentality. It is a deeply affecting novel, without
being schmaltzy. It is a rare gift to
get the balance of emotions the exact right, and Nicholls manages it with great
aplomb.
The
prose of One Day is fabulous. Nicholls writes like dream. The sentences
flow so smoothly that reading this novel is like floating lightly along the
gentle flow of a river. As with everything else, the tone of the narrative is
pitch perfect. The narrative engages you from the first page and your interest
does not slag throughout its four hundred plus pages, which do not contain one
otiose word. There are passages of great wit in the novel, coupled with acute
observations. One Day is a fine comic novel; it is a social comedy in
addition to everything else. The humour is wry but not cringeworthy. Thus
Nicholls’s description of the rituals of modern marriages brings a smile to
your face, but you also find yourself nodding because it rings so true.
One Day is wonderful (or wonderful, wonderful) novel (see the image below), and
Nicholls is a writer in the same tradition as Jonathan Coe and Nick Hornby: a
virtuoso chronicler of how it is to live in modern Britain. Five stars.
