{"id":1509,"date":"2009-04-04T13:15:57","date_gmt":"2009-04-04T12:15:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mcrrview.web.its.manchester.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=373"},"modified":"2016-01-23T21:46:34","modified_gmt":"2016-01-23T20:46:34","slug":"a-day-and-a-night-and-a-day-glen-duncan-simon-schuster-1499-241pp","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=1509","title":{"rendered":"Glen Duncan, <em>A Day and A Night and A Day<\/em> (Simon &#038; Schuster) \u00a314.99, 241pp"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The time of Glen Duncan\u2019s new novel <em>A Day and a Night and a Day<\/em> 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\u2019s interrogated and tortured by the ruthless Harper. Harper wants to know about the people who\u2019ve made his infiltration possible and, in a place where nobody knows of Augustus\u2019 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.<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019 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\u2019s 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\u2019s going to get worse as the book progresses, but it also tells us he\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<p>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:<br \/>\n\u201cTruth, certainty, first principles, all the big franchises,\u201d Harper says. \u201cI was reading a movie review the other day,<em> Superman Returns<\/em>. It had the phrase \u2018this tired franchise\u2019. Sometimes you get a big articulation from an absurd little context\u2014because that\u2019s what the world is now, a tired franchise\u2026<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019t function quite as well in the flashbacks to the relationship with Selina, largely because sentiment doesn\u2019t sit as comfortably in this ultra-analytical framework. This is a problem that\u2019s 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\u2019s a struggle to care about it, and one I never really managed to overcome.<\/p>\n<p>The section in Scotland post-torture is largely forgettable, serving mainly to make us realise \u2013 if we haven\u2019t already \u2013 that Duncan really likes his central character. I would have preferred more exploration of the time between Augustus\u2019 first period with Selina at the end of the sixties and their much briefer reunion in Barcelona, as it\u2019s hard not to feel that he hasn\u2019t fully imagined what happens then.<\/p>\n<p><em>A Day and a Night and a Day<\/em> is undoubtedly ambitious and has passages of prose dense in allusion and meaning, but I couldn\u2019t 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\u2019 racism and her brother\u2019s incestuous desires?) might have concentrated the writing more. It\u2019s questionable whether, in its constant endeavour to be hip and radical, it manages to be either, and isn\u2019t dragged down by the distracting burden of sentimentality instead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The time of Glen Duncan\u2019s 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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[19,116],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v20.2.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Glen Duncan, A Day and A Night and A Day (Simon &amp; Schuster) \u00a314.99, 241pp - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=1509\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Glen Duncan, A Day and A Night and A Day (Simon &amp; Schuster) \u00a314.99, 241pp - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The time of Glen Duncan\u2019s new novel A Day and a Night and a Day is post-9\/11 and America is nervy. 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