'One Day' by David Nicholls - Book Review

Two students meet at university in Scotland and vow to stay in touch with each other after they return to their respective (and very different) lives, and like most English novels class differences are one of the main engines driving the book. In this case these are represented by the slightly raffish and moneyed Dexter Mayhew and his female counterpart the self-conscious working-class northerner Emma Morley. The basic premise of One Day is to capture a snapshot in the lives of Dexter and Emma and this is achieved by dropping in on their lives one day out of every year from 1988 to 2007. This task is made easier by Dex and Em conveniently bumping into each other on rather too many St. Swithin’s Days to be entirely plausible due to their leading such different lives. The characters evolve in two opposite directions, with Emma following the standard rags-to-riches framework, while Dexter’s life gradually falls apart until the positions they held relative to each other at the start of the novel are reversed. In this sense both characters are fairly predictable in their development: Dexter is rich and idle and gets a “job” in TV which involves lots of loafing about and drugs and not much work, while Emma works hard in unimaginably awful places and seems to get nowhere, until change comes to both their lives. Many of the supporting characters are rather stereotypical, especially Emma’s boyfriend Ian, who seems to be the kind of character you would get if you put a dozen lower middle-class wannabe stand-up comedians in a blender and poured the contents out into a book, and he is not the only one. The whole supporting cast is described in the “you-know-the-type” style, which makes you think you’re watching a documentary rather than reading fiction. This “soap-in-print” genre has been around a long time now and in this respect, along with many others, it is maddeningly English. In the end, Dexter’s narcissism gets the better of him, and along with a little bad luck he is brought low, while Emma’s hard work, and a little nepotism (in publishing? Never!), allows her to step out of her old life and into a new one, at, again rather conveniently, exactly the same time it’s Goodnight Vienna for Dexter. The point of all this is, superficially at least, that you should be kind to be people on the way up because you don’t know who you’ll need on the way down, but it is also a tale of redemption, regret, nostalgia and fate. Its heart seems to be centered on the futility of aspiration in youth, no matter what one’s financial and social background (which is a little disingenuous) and that happiness can and should be sought in the little things in this fleeting life we are travelling through. Ultimately this is a good read, and it is recommended, but somehow I enjoyed reading it more than having read it. I would give it 3.5 stars if I could.

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