The time of Glen Duncan’s new novel A Day and a Night and a Day is post-9/11 and America is nervy. Augustus Rose, a mixed race sixties radical, has infiltrated a group of extremists in the hope of avenging the death of his lover Selina in a fictional 2002 bomb in El Corte Ingles in Barcelona, but the US secret service arrests him days before his revenge. The title refers to the length of time that Augustus Rose spends in a cell in Morocco as he’s interrogated and tortured by the ruthless Harper. Harper wants to know about the people who’ve made his infiltration possible and, in a place where nobody knows of Augustus’ existence, has no need to follow international law. In his pursuit of information, he moves from humdrum beatings to bluntly horrific eye gouging and Duncan shows us it all.

Such a scenario risks being uncomfortably claustrophobic for the reader, but the tension of the torture and interrogation scenes is partially relieved by flashbacks to Augustus’ affair with Selina and his subsequent reunion with her in Barcelona (a reunion which also lasts a day and a night and a day). However, the tension is virtually dissipated by Duncan’s decision to also intersperse scenes of the time post-torture, when Augustus retreats to the Scottish island of Calansay; his limp and his eye patch tell us the torture’s going to get worse as the book progresses, but it also tells us he’s going to be freed or escape, which means that the eventual scene when he gets out has little dramatic tension to offset its incredible events and coincidences.

Yet one suspects that, for Duncan, the narration of the torture and its related drama is secondary compared to the attempt to skewer modern, consumerist society and the War on Terror. For example, Harper is immediately identified as one of the bad guys by the fact that he wears Gap chinos and the only water served in the terrorist cell is Evian. The dialogue quickly abandons all pretence of naturalism in favour of the essayistic, philosophical exchanges that bear all the hallmarks of Don Delillo, where even a discussion about cinema is loaded with significance:
“Truth, certainty, first principles, all the big franchises,” Harper says. “I was reading a movie review the other day, Superman Returns. It had the phrase ‘this tired franchise’. Sometimes you get a big articulation from an absurd little context—because that’s what the world is now, a tired franchise…

Etc. This hyper-real dialogue is an acquired taste, but Duncan regularly pulls it off to good effect in the torture scenes. However, it doesn’t function quite as well in the flashbacks to the relationship with Selina, largely because sentiment doesn’t sit as comfortably in this ultra-analytical framework. This is a problem that’s symptomatic of the sections with Selina. Duncan seems torn between wanting to write about politics and wanting to write about love; unfortunately, he never really manages to make us believe that characters who analyse anything and everything somehow manage the suspension of disbelief necessary for love to function, especially to the extent that the love becomes so all-consuming that it can deal with everything from incest to a thirty year separation. Theirs is meant to be the tragedy at the centre of the novel, but it’s a struggle to care about it, and one I never really managed to overcome.

The section in Scotland post-torture is largely forgettable, serving mainly to make us realise – if we haven’t already – that Duncan really likes his central character. I would have preferred more exploration of the time between Augustus’ first period with Selina at the end of the sixties and their much briefer reunion in Barcelona, as it’s hard not to feel that he hasn’t fully imagined what happens then.

A Day and a Night and a Day is undoubtedly ambitious and has passages of prose dense in allusion and meaning, but I couldn’t help feeling that it tries a little too hard. One fewer narrative strand or problem for Augustus and Selina to deal with (e.g. do we need both her parents’ racism and her brother’s incestuous desires?) might have concentrated the writing more. It’s questionable whether, in its constant endeavour to be hip and radical, it manages to be either, and isn’t dragged down by the distracting burden of sentimentality instead.

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