'Day: A Novel' by A.L. Kennedy

A Novel

A.L. Kennedy

Alfred A. Knopf: 280 pp., $24

YEARS from now, when Scotland achieves independence from the British, just imagine: There will appear on a celebratory dais a number of doddering survivors from that group of writers who put Scotland on the international literary map: Alasdair Gray, Jeff Torrington, Agnes Owens, James Kelman, Janice Galloway and A.L. Kennedy. (We know this from the pertinent examples of Ireland and Estonia: genuine independence always proceeds from a startling reappearance of a long-suppressed cultural identity.) These diverse Scottish writers share a fierce commitment to using the English language to forge a definitive Scottish identity in telling stories about people long marginalized and giving them a vivid, innovative presence on the international stage.

Kennedy is a prolific writer whose works include the well-received "Everything You Need" and "Paradise" -- as well as a short, intensely disturbing book about bullfighting and a modest book on film, "The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp." In her fiction, Kennedy gives voice to people from the edges of society, and though her novels sometimes resemble baggy monsters -- though always rewarding to read -- it is in her short stories that her talent for illuminating concision is most evident. In the story "Awaiting an Adverse Reaction," she condenses the entire history of a marriage and its inevitable breakup into four pages -- all hinging upon the polio vaccine that the female character takes before going abroad on holiday.

"Day," which has just won one of the United Kingdom's most important awards, the Costa prize, concerns itself with Alfred Day, a British airman who, five years after the end of World War II, has returned to Germany where he had been a prisoner of war and participates as an extra in a movie about that experience. Having served as a ball turret gunner on a bomber flying over Germany, Alfie now lives quietly as a book clerk. Most readers will catch an allusion to Randall Jarrell's poem "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner," probably the best known poem to come out of a world war:

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,

And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.

Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,

I woke to black flak and the nightmare

fighters.

When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.