The First Saturday Book Club

I thought I’d drop in a plug here for a radio appearance I’m making this weekend.

Regular readers will have noticed my fellow academic Graham Price providing a final thought in my theatre reviews of The Silver Tassie and The Cripple of Inishmaan. Well now I’m following in his footsteps by appearing on Dublin South FM’s The First Saturday Book Club. The show will be broadcast from Dundrum Town Centre this Saturday June 4th at 12:30pm. A critical mass of ex-University Observer writers will be present given that I’ll be joined by editor emeritus Sorcha Nic Mhathuna and that the show is hosted by Eve Rowan.

The book under discussion this month is One Day by David Nicholls. BBC scriptwriter Nicholls previously wrote the novel Starter for Ten, and then the screenplay of its film adaptation, and One Day starts off similarly as a class conscious romantic comedy in the late 1980s focused on the intense friendship between two recent graduates Dexter Mayhew and Emma Morley, before it develops into something a good deal more ambitious. The story of Dexter and Emma becomes nothing less than the story of Britain itself in the last 20 years.

The gimmick blazoned on the title ‘Twenty Years. Two People. One Day’ refers to Nicolls’ audacious decision to surf in and out of the lives of this odd couple by focusing on them for only one day of each year, and always the same day; St Swithin’s Day, the day they graduated and finally talked to each other. Does this technique work, or does it become contrived? Can an unrequited platonic love story really handle being burdened with the symbolic significance of representing a nation’s recent social and political history?

Well, if you want to hear what we all made of the book, tune in to 93.9FM, or listen to the podcast later at http://dublinsouthfm.ie/shows/95/The-First-Saturday-Book-Club.