Bored with the lack of challenge involved in picking off eighty- and ninety-something authors as it has been recently, The Curse Of Electric Halibut has decided to pick off someone from the slightly lower age bracket, just to keep everyone on their toes, those who haven't just turned up their toes, anyway. And it is Daniel Woodrell, most famous for his 2006 novel Winter's Bone and its 2010 film adaptation. That's the only thing of his I've ever read, back in early 2016, but that was enough for the beady eye of death to swing slowly in his direction. Woodrell's age (72) and the curse length of a whisker under ten years are respectively about ten years below and a couple of years above the current averages.
Thursday, December 11, 2025
the last book I read
Alfie Day has had a better war than some; still alive, for one thing, and moreover with all of his limbs and most of his mental faculties intact, a bit of PTSD aside. This is doubly lucky as his job as the tail gunner on a Lancaster bomber would qualify as one of the more thrillingly high-risk jobs, even within the context of being in the RAF during World War II.
The book's nominal "now" is a handful of years after the end of the war, with Alfie having decided to take up an offer of being an extra in a film set during the war, for which filming is taking place in some unspecified eastern European country. A somewhat quixotic decision, on the face of it, what with it bringing back memories of his wartime experiences both as part of his bomber crew but also as a prisoner of war after his last bombing mission resulted in the deaths of most of his crew and his having to bail out over enemy territory. Maybe the idea was that re-confronting some of this stuff would bring some sort of closure and enable him to come to terms with things; more importantly of course it provides a narrative backdrop to some flashback action wherein we are dropped back into a set of selected scenes from the war.
These sections are mainly concerned with the series of bombing raids Alfie's crew carries out, with the imminence of potential fiery death at all times, and the associated brittle banter and camaraderie. It's not all getting raked by tracer fire, performing evasive manoeuvres and firebombing Dresden, though, my goodness no. There are occasional bouts of leave wherein the crew get to do some rest and relaxation, get to know each other, and do the obligatory drinking and roistering. Alfie also meets a young lady called Joyce while sheltering from an air-raid and a tentative romance develops, tempered by Joyce's admission that she has a husband, albeit one whom she doesn't really like very much and who is away on military duty from which there's no guarantee he'll ever return.
The present-day setting isn't purely a narrative device to hang some flashbacks off, though; the motley crew of actors and ex-servicemen that constitutes the film's cast holds some interest, in particular Vasyl, a slightly shady character who may be Ukrainian or may equally possibly be Latvian. Alfie's initial assumption that he was a heroic resistance fighter in one or other of those countries is somewhat undercut by Vasyl's later admission that he was basically a Big Old Nazi and responsible for some eye-watering atrocities during the war that he will now face no consequences for, or not via the standard legal route anyway. Alfie and his mates may have an eye to some less formal vigilante-style justice once filming duties are out of the way, though.
Alfie is briefly tempted by making the most of the opportunities that exist for an exciting life of crime in the lax post-war regime in mainland Europe, but eventually returns to England, perhaps partly persuaded by the idea of rekindling his relationship with Joyce. We are invited to infer that things have simmered down to the occasional exchange of letters after Joyce's husband rather inconveniently returned alive and well from the war, but the latest letters suggest that she may be open to some sort of, hem hem, arrangement.
World War II is a prime subject for fiction, as any novel set here comes pre-loaded with interest, danger, the great sweep of history, and all that stuff, and there are quite a few books on this list that use it as a backdrop, most recently Light Perpetual, Fragrant Harbour and Charlotte Gray (the review of The Reader has a fuller list). Just to illustrate the wide palette of choices available to you as an author, the first two there treat the war as just a brief interlude in the wider timeline of the story, while Charlotte Gray embeds pretty much the entire story in the context of the war. There are also varying degrees of success, and you need to be careful not to draw accusations of just throwing some wartime stuff in there to weigh the story down with a bit of unearned gravitas, something you'll recall I thought Light Perpetual was guilty of.
I don't think that criticism can be made of Day, but it seemed to be, although well-written and involving, slightly unsatisfactory for reasons I couldn't quite put my finger on. The framing device of the film shoot is odd, and Alfie's reasons for being there are never explained - as a mildly-traumatised ex-serviceman it seems like the last thing you'd want to do and it invites the suspicion that he did it just because it provided a convenient narrative scaffolding to hang the other stuff off. The most interesting thing that Alfie actually does (or we are strongly invited to infer that he does, anyway) during the various flashbacks, which is to murder his abusive father by pushing him in a canal, is mentioned briefly and then never referred to again. Ursula K Le Guin offers some criticisms here, most of which I find myself in agreement with.
Maybe the answer is to be found by looking at Kennedy's other work - the two novels featured here, So I am Glad and Looking For The Possible Dance, are quirky character-driven things with a fairly narrow domestic setting. Some of the charm of that seems to have been lost here in the attempt to embed Alfie's story within the wider sweep of history, an attempt perhaps made because that's the sort of thing that wins literary awards, and sure enough Day won the Costa Novel Award (formerly the Whitbread Award and defunct since 2022) in 2007. I think Days Without End is the most recent other Costa winner on this list; that review also contains a list of other winners featured on this blog.
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