Volume 55, Number 7 · May 1, 2008
'The End of Heaven'
By David Lodge
Day
by A.L. Kennedy
Knopf, 274 pp., $24.00
When I first heard that A.L. Kennedy's new novel was about a tailgunner in an RAF Lancaster bomber in World War II, I was frankly astonished. Nothing in this writer's previous work or life, as far as I was acquainted with them, apart from the fact that she writes quite frequently from a male point of view, made her choice of subject seem anything other than utterly surprising—and risky. She is one of the most respected of younger British fiction writers, especially admired for her stylistic virtuosity and droll, dark sense of humor; but her novels and short stories to date have been mostly about personal relationships, domestic conflicts, and various kinds of social and psychological dysfunction like abuse, addiction, and depression, set against a contemporary background, especially in Scotland, where she was born in 1965 and brought up. How, I wondered, would such a writer set about recreating the experience of an RAF tailgunner in the war that ended in 1945? And why?
Review, 4477 words
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