So this book was a bestseller in 2009. It is back in the windows of bookshops now because of a new Netflix series, closely based on this story. Every newspaper, journal and magazine I have read of late has had excited reviewers waxing lyrical about everything David Nicholls. I understand the buzz and the enthusiasm. He is that rare kind of author who writes phenomenally successful popular fiction which has an underlying literary base. The reader does not need to recognise any literary allusion in order to fully enjoy the story but for me it adds immeasurably to my enjoyment.
The clever and unusual scenario is this: a couple meet on university graduation day, having been in the same city for the last four years without knowing each other. The date is 15th July and it will become the most important day of the year in the lives of both of them. They do not ‘get together’ although the reader knows that they should, and in some ways both Dexter and Emma know that too. They go their very separate ways and agree to meet on that particular day in July each year. Friends, just friends.
I remember reading this book for the first time and getting to page 51 where a letter is written, lost and thus never posted. This letter would have changed the lives of both main characters. I remember thinking that this was very ‘Hardyian.’ Thomas Hardy, the master of fateful incidents. It wasn’t until I was much further into the story that I realised I was right with this presumption, I felt quite pleased with myself for realising this if I’m honest. David Nicholls studied Thomas Hardy in his English degree and the plots of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Far from the Madding Crowd and Jude the Obscure simmered in his mind for many years before this book was written, particularly Tess of the D’Urbervilles, of which he did an adaptation for the BBC in 2008. Maybe the simmering had now become boiling point because this book appeared just a year later. There has already been a film of One Day starring Anne Hathaway but the Netflix series has the interesting advantage of each episode being 15th July of a certain year. It is good watching including some gorgeous scenery of Paris, Rome, Greece and more.
Anyway, back to the book. I loved the epigrams that preface each part of the story. David Nicholls gives us tastes of Great Expectations, the famous Philip Larkin poem:
What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?
And, of course, Hardy. Here we have a beautiful quote from Far from the Madding Crowd which suits Emma and Dexter as much as it did Bathsheba Everdene and Gabriel Oak:
‘They spoke very little of their mutual feelings: pretty phrases and warm attentions being probably unnecessary between such tried friends.’
The idea of this focus on dates that provides the bones on which One Day is built, is entirely Hardy…and Tess. Tess is somewhat obsessed by dates and their importance. She feels that each of us has this other date haunting our yearly calendar. We will of course never realise the significance of it, no matter how many times we live through it.
In One Day, Emma reads this short passage to Dex, although she is not convinced he totally grasps the meaning:
‘There was yet another date, of greater importance to her than those; that of her own death, when all these charms would have disappeared; a day which lay sly and unseen and among all the other days of the year, giving no sign or sound when she annually passed over it; but not the less surely there. When was it? Why did she not feel the chill of each yearly encounter with such a cold relation?’
‘Sly and unseen’ are words Emma particularly likes. I understand why. And this ‘sly and unseen’ day is for Emma, of course, the 15th July. For me there is the added frisson of 15th July being my birthday. Who knows if it is also my own ‘sly and unseen day.’ We live through the date of our death every year.
Somebody asked me if this book was actually a Rom. Com and it is but it is also so very much more than that. David Nicholls has produced a story that is funny, frustrating, difficult, real, and I have to say, ineffably sad. Some would say a reflection of life itself but maybe that is getting a little too heavy. Without doubt it is such a good read. If you haven’t read it then do so…and if you have, then do so again!
When did you last read Daphne Du Maurier I wonder? I have just revisited Rebecca and Frenchman’s Creek and I have written about them both in beyondtheairingcupboard.co.uk
Happy Reading.