One Day
by Adashir Vakil
Hamish Hamilton $169
Adashir Vakil's second novel is deceptive. His impressive debut, Beach Boy, was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award, and at first glance One Day looks like a featureless follow-up, just another tired treatise about the navel-gazing of a middle-aged couple whose dreams and aspirations have floundered on the rocks of reality.
The cleverness of this book, however, is the way in which it takes a familiar theme and manipulates it to make a whole series of thoughtful statements about the state of modern relationships and the struggle to reconcile emotional necessity with primal animal desire in a new millennium.
The story is woven around 24 hours in the life of a couple living in London in 1999. Vakil has tried to be too clever by making the date March 15, allowing for several 'Ides of March' references. While the concept of examining the events of one day may have been stolen from a popular US television drama series (24), the way in which an apparently ordinary day encapsulates and defines the lives of the main characters is impressively original.
Ben Tennyson is a teacher in his early 30s. His nine-year marriage to Priya, a broadcaster, is rife with inconsistencies, uncertainties and insecurity. As they lie in bed just after midnight following a stressful dinner party, Ben cogitates while Priya masturbates (a common occurrence).