June 2, 2021
Day For Night, by Jean McNeil
Day For Night hooked me from its first gorgeous lines, striking evocative prose, marvellous sentences that swept me along much in the way of Virginia Woolf’s Street Haunting. Something Woolfian about the project entire, though the copy on the back cover refers to Orlando. There’s also Walter Benjamin, whom I know nothing about, and I sometimes get deterred sometimes when writers write in homage to other writers I’ve never read before. This can be alienating, but here it isn’t. Richard is making a movie about Benjamin. It’s 2018 in London and Richard is still reeling from the shock of the Brexit vote, of the nastiness it seems to have unleashed in his world. There are parallels between his moment and that of Benjamin, who was exiled from his native Germany. Richard, born to a Kenyan father, an Italian mother. His history is complicated, sense of himself as a citizen of the world is anchored by his London home. Which feels like another world now. He feels alienated from his family as well, from his wife, a film producer, who’s proven to be far more successful than he has and her paycheques pay their bills. When he meets a young man who’s to play Benjamin in the movie, Richard becomes besotted. Something is going to happen. He knows this.
Day for Night reminded me of Ali Smith’s Seasonal quartet, in its immediacy, and engagement with the UK’s political moment post-Brexit. (Perhaps also because it’s about film and a man called Richard. It made me think of another Richard too, Richard Dalloway.) The novel’s immediacy, however, reads as otherworldly in 2021. The overwrought preoccupation with Brexit seems faraway now that it’s happened, and in light of the pandemic. I found Richard’s agonizing ill-aimed in places, too much. Richard, do you know what a privilege it is to cavort around a city freely while fretting about Brexit? How what is existential in 2018 seems almost frivolous just a few years later? There is something artificial about the way that Richard speaks. He’s more a mouthpiece than a realized character. The meticulous construction of his spoken sentences are even commented upon in the novel—just a quirk of his. But it’s definitely strange.
I will confess that for the first half of Day for Night, I wasn’t sure I could commit to this book. Richard was unnatural. In some ways, he was kind of intolerable. But I persisted, and I am glad I did. Because something happens halfway through that’s entirely unexpected, and changes everything. Casting the entire book in a different light, filters upon filters to understand what’s happening. There are so many layers of meaning, even the layer in which the current moment of this very contemporary story seems out of date now—this is fascinating. And it turns out that this novel has a broader scope than I’d first supposed. Stretching across centuries, and continents, and media. Between reality, and unreality. Summer and winter. Night and day. Male and female. Messing with binaries. Diffusing polarities. It’s a rich and satisfying project.
