The Book Tower

She still had the same eyes, bright and shrewd, and she still laughed with her mouth tightly shut, as if holding in some secret. In many ways she was far more attractive than her twenty-two year old self. She was no longer cutting her own hair for one thing, and she had lost some of that library pallor, that shoe-gazing petulance and surliness. How would he feel, he wondered, if he were seeing that face for the first time now? If he had been allocated table twenty-four, had sat down and introduced himself. Of all the people here today, he thought, he would only want to talk to her. He picked up his drink and pushed back his chair.

David Nicholls’ One Day is a book that’s currently causing a summer buzz, where satisfied readers are already asking eachother who will play Dex and Em in the inevitable film version (fellows readers being very easy to hook up with thanks to the magic of Twitter).
The stir this novel is causing is well deserved; it’s one of the best British novels I’ve read for years. Certainly there with Jonathan Coe and Nick Hornby on top form, and a book I was expecting to be a lightweight read has proved to be one of extraordinary depth and quality.

Dexter and Emma meet as students on St Swithin’s day in 1988. One Day revisits them on each subsequent July 15th over the next 20 years. Dex is an arrogant and frankly obnoxious young man whose ego is given an unjustified boost when he becomes a minor tv celebrity as the host of Largin’ It, a programme that makes The Word look like Newsnight. Dex is the shallow and self-centred guy we’ve all met, hated, endured or avoided. Emma is a sensible romantic girl (although at times equally shallow) who becomes a teacher and eventually a successful author. They never quite hit it off in 1988, but slowly become best friends. Dex pursues the road of drink, drugs and women, while Em embarks on a couple of doomed relationship. We meet them every year, as time flashes by with alarming regularity. They mature, things happen and their lives are shook up. We warm to them.

David Nicholls doesn’t explore social history too much, and in many ways this is the strength of the book. Dex’s musical taste gives a flavour of the years as they pass, and his lifestyle reflects something of the 1990s but we don’t become too bogged down in the era. For anyone born after the mid 60s One Day will prove particularly resonant with its sketches of student life in the late 80s and laddism of the 90s (which was particularly vivid for me in all of its ugliness), but Nicholls excels as a writer in tackling more universal subjects. I found the sequence where Dexter struggles with fatherhood particularly convincing, and equally his awkward relationship with his family.

What’s best is how One Day gradually evolves from an apparently undemanding read into something rather wonderful. It is similar in many ways to Nicholls’ earlier Starter for Ten, although he has noticeably matured as a writer since then. I don’t want to give away too much about the ending, but this is a book dealing with similar themes to The Time Traveller’s Wife that proved to be infinitely superior and far, far more moving. Nicholls finds a way to effortlessly move between the years, most effectively towards the end when we are allowed one last and poignant peek at 1989. And the significance of July 15th becomes all too sadly clear.

I cannot recommend this novel more. And if you find Dex particularly loathsome that’s just par for the course; be warned that by the end you won’t want to forget him.