Some Day I’ll find you...

Edinburgh University. 1988. Dexter is a lower second public school slob, Em a double first northerner. David Nicholls’ One Day logs their lives with unerring and sometimes painful accuracy, together and apart. Thereby hangs the tale. Each chapter is a closely observed annual diary of one day, 15 July, over twenty years from the day after graduation — “feeling twenty two acting seventeen”. It’s engaging, absorbing, good humoured stuff, high on characerisation, in which it’s easy to lose yourself. Whilst a surprisingly happy ending is stacking up, there’s certainly an unexpected twst on page 385. What remains is almost unbearably poignant if you have any instinct for time passing, beloved..

For any former student of a certain generation, this novel cuts sharp but kindly, andin fine close to the bone. Dialogue has been captured in fine detail by a discerning script writer’s ear. Nicholls takes a “God” perspective, seeing all characters continuously from the inside out. This raises some narrative challenges, because there is no room for the selective blindness of a first-person narrator, but it’s wonderful to see technique carried off as triumphantly as this. The way the story is told, it unfolds believably over two decades, noting with unerring accuracy and tenderness various cultural and personal distinctives along the way. It will make a good film, with a bit of Merchant Ivory treatment.

It would spoil the story to give away details, but relationship between these two highly educated people is far more driven by cock-up than conspiracy, and this in itself says something about the wisdom of seizing the day —“Sooner strangle an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires,” said William Blake. There are no dress rehearsals. Today is the real thing, and the only one you’re giong to get. To quote the blessed Richard Branson, “Life is a hell of alot more fun if you say “yes” rather than “no.” That in itself is, surely, a life affirming message.

Cranmer (almost) gets his man

In the glory days of the Church of England, when Archbishop Fisher was on the throne, real vicars had leisure for two defining activities — playing with train sets and reading detective novels. In these dog days they have to spend much more time on the day job. I had a day off recently reading Revelation — the detective novel vicars can read without a conscience because the “Inspector Morse’s Boss” character is none other than Archbishop Cranmer himself. Those were the days, when Archbishops of Canterbury had leisure to superintend detectives who could appear in novels for the clergy to read.

C. J. Sansom has a fine eye for every nuance of the last days of Henry VIII. He spots the various complex subcurrents of post-dissolution England perfectly — heaving filthy streets, rising middle class, and upheaval all round. This, his fourth Tudor historical thriller, is set in 1543. Henry VIII is become an increasingly unstable old dog — irascible, toothless but prone to bite anyway. Various heads have been rolling. Mainline reformers are hanging on in there by their fingernails, whilst trying to shoo an understandably reluctant Catherine Parr into Hank’s marital house of horrors. Out on the streets “Bible Men” are workshopping various forms of “radical biblical” religion with more zeal than understanding, trying to turn the C of E onto a fundamentalist associational sect. Revelation is a Name of the Rose type romp through the stews and marshes of Tudor London in pursuit of a Biblicist nutter — Bizarre Cluedo with murder weapons like apocalyptic fish-oil and exploding Maggots. This book is Excellent Escapism from a world where religious nutters plan mayhem whilst radical Bible men try to turn the C of E into a Biblicist sect. Sleep Tight tonight. Under Cranmer’s supervision, Shardlake, a very Anglican slight underachiever, almost gets his man, and the evil is flushed away. It all comes of handling the poetry of the Apocalypse like a textbook. Reader beware...