A Day and a Night and a Day

Glen Duncan

Ecco (an imprint of Harpercollins), 2009

Glen Duncan’s best-known previous work, I, Lucifer, in which the Devil is incarnated in modern flesh for a brief interlude to seek redemption, was notable for two things: the lazy obviousness of its conceit, and the very noticeable strength of its prose. His latest book, A Day and a Night and a Day, has the same ease of conceit – the prolonged, digression-filled dialogue between a man and his torturer – but the strength of the prose has increased exponentially.

This is a powerful, unforgettable book, the chronicle of an uneven confrontation between Augustus – middle-aged, Black, a complicated, ethical terrorist – and Harper –young, white, handsome, a cold, personable torturer. The scenes of their interactions are always concluded by the resumption of Augustus’ physical torment, and the liberal flashbacks to Augustus’ past make the descriptions of his present agony more and more excruciating for the reader.

Which on one level doesn’t sound like much of a recommendation, but in truth there’s none greater: this is a book you can’t read comfortably. These two men represent both sides of the most horrible moral coinage reissued during the eight years of President Bush, the terrorist who acts out of principled morality and the official who has consciously renounced both principles and morality. Duncan’s almost uncanny ear for language completely snares the reader in this exquisitely awful contradiction, and his riffingly energetic imagination is mirrored by that of Augustus, who distracts himself from his pain by almost reflexively creating background stories for the young man causing that pain:

Harper leans back in his chair and laces his fingers behind his head. In the movies this calm would have rage just beneath it. Modernity demands such psychologies derive from breakage, trauma, delusion. The closest Augustus can get is imagining Harper feeling a slightly above average level of irritation when browsing a microelectronics store and finding two models of something both of which do almost all the things he wants but neither of which does all (in Augustus’s vision Harper’s accompanied by an equinely beautiful young woman who with constant low-level annoyance is one of his mistresses. Though mildly aphrodisiacal the experience depresses her these days since like everything else it’s become self-conscious, situated, ironic. It reminds her that she sits on a nest of things she knows about herself – the exact formidable degree of her beauty, the exact formidable degree of her intellect, the exact formidable degree of her corruption – and isn’t likely to shift from it now. Shopping, with the ample resources she has, outlines the dimensions of her unsatisfactory life, alternatives to which she knows she’ll never explore.) Augustus sees all this because a version of Harper’s consumer irritation is familiar to him. He lived for years in Manhattan with the urban malaria of precision dissatisfactions. But whereas for Harper the condition segues into a feeling of well-being, for Augustus it was always a failure, proof of vague yet giant loss.

Amidst all the subtle, beautifully-realized things going on in that sample of prose (and there’s a stretch to equal it on literally every page of A Day and a Night and a Day), from the deft dissection of Harper’s shallowness to the enviable turns of phrase like “urban malaria of precision dissatisfactions,” there’s that bravura summation of Harper’s imaginary mistress … a gorgeous little fugue performed on a character who isn’t even ‘real’ and who’s never mentioned again. There’s a deftness at work here that knows it has energy to spare.

In a chillingly modern turn, the two men openly discuss the horrible things Harper is having done to Augustus in their little room. Harper has the typical young person’s eagerness to be tested, although he also relishes his role as God in the exchange, the creator of pain and its reliever as well. He rightly assumes Augustus will attempt to withstand his agonies by mentally retreating to the bright spots of his past, using those spots to beat back the darkness of the present. He admires Augustus for that, although it’s the reader and not Harper who gets the full story, starting with a wonderfully-illuminated love story set in 1960s Manhattan, when Augustus felt the love of his life for a white woman named Selina. The sheer skill with which Duncan elides bittersweet memory and brutal physical detail makes passage after passage shimmer like wet grass:

“It was a good time,” Augustus says, seemingly involuntarily since the sound of his own voice surprises him. “We thought we were shining.”

“But you’re not using it now. The memory of love.”

Augustus coughs up something ironish and pulpy, retains it on his tongue for the moment it takes Harper to say with a nod he can get rid of it, then turns his head and spits it into the corner.

“Wouldn’t be any point,” Augustus says. “You need something that hasn’t already failed.”

Of course there’s politics in the book as well – how could there not be, when Duncan so clearly believes it’s politics of a very recent vintage that created the very backdrop of his story? Augustus has seen enough of life to warily foreswear politics, and Harper is in his own way equally disengaged from the subject, although what is to Augustus a series of bad choices is to Harper more like a series of ant farms, to be viewed with amazed, slightly revolted fascination:

“He’s fascinating at close quarters.” [Harper says of President Bush]

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“There’s an autism that comes with invulnerability.”

“I thought you said these things hung on threads?”

“They do, but he doesn’t know that. The invulnerability’s a delusion but you can’t blame him for it. All the skeletons are out – imbecility, greed, corruption, hypocrisy, criminality, contempt for thinking – and yet the sun still shines and water comes out the tap when he turns it on.”

Duncan is clever enough to leave open the question of whether or not Harper is theatrically enhancing his own nihilism for the sake of Augustus and the sickening scenario they’re playing out, but I doubt Duncan himself believes the issue is open to question: the richly done segments of Augustus’ back story make it clear that conscience, however scarred and at times unsure of itself, has always been with him – whereas Harper , however charismatic, is a creature who could never be anybody’s hero (we never see his own back story – Duncan subtly damns him by leaving us with the impression that Augustus’ imaginings might very well have been considerably better than Harper’s reality). When he describes himself as “vulnerable to boredom,” Harper isn’t describing a young man’s hunger for stimulation – he’s describing a parasite’s need to change hosts when the old one’s used up. His emptiness makes him a sculpted avatar of the world Duncan invokes in the novel’s most transfixing scene, when Augustus loses an eye to his interrogators and the narrative all but yells its bewilderment in a timbre worthy of Jack London:

After the loss of his eye he tells Harper everything. You think you know the universe, its amorality, its unjudgmental accommodations, its fundamentalist adherence to the religion of cause an effect – but you don’t. Not until someone gouges your eye out with the scalloped handle of a stainless steel spoon. They put the metal there, apply force, intention, and what must follow follows. What can the universe do about it? Nothing. The universe is compelled to supply effects on causal demand. You think in spite of all the available evidence to the contrary the universe will draw the line at your eye, which has seen your whole precious waking life, but the universe is in no position to grant exceptions. The universe is the perfect ideologue. If this is a scalpel and this pressure then this is an optic nerve – cut. Language cooperates. Language astonishes with its fidelity: my eye. Disbelief keeps surging: How can it be if they’ve forced it out? How can your eye suddenly be an object first and your eye second? How can the attachment between the words and the things endure? But your eye’s part of the universe so obeys the universe’s laws. Together the universe and language radiate brilliant innocence. They’ve gouged my eye out. Your beautiful magician’s eyes. And God has not yet said a word!

It takes a writer remarkably confident of his own powers to choose such a visceral moment to go all philosophizing, and yet in A Day and a Night and a Day (the title refers to the duration of Augustus’ torment at Harper’s hands), the results are never less than intensely successful.

Needless to say, the novel isn’t flawless – even Fielding never quite pulled that off. Some of the action at the climax has more than a whiff of implausibility to it, for instance – our author, for all the conviction of his philosophical asides, is in a position to grant exceptions, although by page 200 there isn’t a reader in the world who’ll be upset by any of them. And as the excerpts we’ve seen so far (in all their gaudy length! The stuff’s too good to chop up) amply demonstrate, Duncan has a pathological distrust of the humble comma.

But offering such pointers after such a banquet as this feels distinctly ungrateful. A Day and a Night and a Day takes the mesmerized, appalled reader on a dark journey Dante would have recognized, a voyage in which the sky is always dark, the faces of your loved ones have become reflections of pain, and all dawns are false. That we ultimately cannot hate Harper for his professional gusto is perhaps our novelist bitterly suggesting not that all morality is relevant but rather that these last eight years have numbed us to finer obligations of hatred. And whichever side of that coin lands facing up, Duncan has succeeded in making us doubt its value.

And just when you think the resulting cynicism is all-engulfing, the characters – and maybe even the wise-beyond-his years author – collide almost painfully with that most persistent of all human weaknesses, hope:

“The transition between obscurity and fame used to be mysterious [Harper says]. Now it’s transparent. The message is there’s nothing special about this person but we’re going to tell you there is and you’re going respond as if there is. Cut to a billion dollars later.”

Augustus knows Harper is right and it gives him a feeling of muscular relief to be leaving the world. His body gets a premonitory sense of itself shed like an overcoat. The people he loved are gone anyway. God’s been burned up but the habit of imagining meeting the dead persists. A pleasant place of white stone floors and flowering jasmine, blue sky, the crowds of history milling as in a Roman forum, his mother somewhere among them. He knows it’s a fantasy, which at the moment pierces him because it means never Selina again either. You live for years with beliefs you’d deny having then the end comes and takes even them away. For a second he doesn’t care if the conversation dies – then does. Riddled with life though you can barely move.

“Riddled with life” aptly describes A Day and a Night and a Day. You’re unlikely to read a better novel this year.