I really ought to read have read One Day on July 15, but I didn't. I started reading it on a plane at the end of May because I had not much else to hand.
Which is a way of saying that I didn't mean to read it at all, but when I did I sped through 435 pages in a couple of days.
Posh boy Dexter Mayhew and down to earth Yorkshire lass Emma Morley meet at university. The story of their friendship begins on July 15, 1988, and we catch up with again on the next nineteen July 15s.
Dexter is floppy-fringed, handsome and rich. He walks effortlessly into a television career that we know will end in tears; Emma's aspirations to be a novelist are destined to be deflated by the rewarding drudgery of teaching.
The backdrop is, of course, the fall of Thatcher, the grey years of Major and the thrill and failure of Blair, leavened by reminders of the strange things we used to do back then. (I am assuming most readers wll be 40-somethings, encountering with varying degrees of embarrassment, the fads and frustrations of earlier lives, each saying to themselves, I knew someone like that too, wonder where they ended up?)
Dexter doesn't need to worry much about a career. He had mentioned journalism but "only as a distraction and alibi."
Journalism would mean grappling with difficult stuff like words and ideas, but he though he might have the makings of a decent photographer, if only because he had a strong sense of when things looked right. At this stage in his life, his main criterion for choosing a career was that it should sound good in a girl's ear...
They will holiday together in Greece.
Until now travel had always been a fraught affair. Each year until (Emma) was sixteen, it had been two weeks fighting with her sister in a caravan in Filey while her parents drank steadily and looked out at the rain, a sort of harsh experiment in the limits of human proximity.
(Why does Nicholls include 'sort of' here and slow the sentence?)
Seven years later, Emma is trying to write.
The words glowed in bilious green on the word processor screen ... They represented her latest project, an attempt at a series of commercial, discreetly feminist crime novels. She had read all of Agatha Christie at eleven and later lots of Chandler and James M Cain. There seemed no reason why she shouldn't try writing something in between, but she was discovering once again that reading and writing were not the same - you couldn't just soak it up and squeeze it out again.
... perhaps crime fiction was just another failed project to place alongside trapeze, Buddhism and Spanish.
There was a knock on the plywood door. "How are things in the Anne Frank wing?
That line again. For Ian a joke was not a single-use item but something you brought out again and again until it fell apart in your hands like a cheap umbrella.
Emma is funny, much funnier than her comedian boyfriend Ian Whitehead (somehow the name Ian Whitehead tells you all you want to know about Ian Whitehead). On the back, Jonathan Coe is quoted a saying "You really do put the book down with the hallucinatory feeling that they've become as well known to you as your closest friends," and everyone who reads One Day would be pleased to know Emma.
And I am sort of missing Emma, sort of wondering how much of Ian Whitehead there is in me, and wondering if anyone gets this far without making a lot of mistakes.
And I am still sort of wondering why I was reluctant to like this novel...
