Like other reviewers I found this book confusing not least because there are gaps where a few words or half a sentence appear to be missing, it makes it hard to follow the action and dialogue at times, not sure if that is the style of the book or a glitch in the ARC. The main character is a film director and therefore his view of the world is quite cinematic, everything is described by him in his head and out loud as if we were watching a film, it may have made a better film. He is also free in sharing his thoughts and observations on the world as he finds it, which I could identify with at times but also felt a little obvious especially the reflections around Brexit. Perhaps more time needs to go by. Sadly I found this distracted me from the purpose of the book and hid the glimmer of insight it was trying to highlight. Certainly nothing like Orlando on which it was modelled.

With thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I tried. This has an interesting premise- a couple making a film about Walter Benjamin cast the attractive young actor Elliot in the role and then find themselves in a mess. So we've got art, infidelity, philosophy, WWII, and a lot of other themes including Brexit in a novel which, to me at least, felt like a stretch,. It wasn't for me and I DNF. Thanks to netgalley for the ARC.

Richard is a screenwriter and director of art house films. Joanna is a film producer. Married, with two near-adult children, living in London comfortably but by no means wealthy, the reader through them examines the complex elements that comprise one’s identity at middle age. And not just any middle age, but middle age today.

Jean McNeil’s Day for Night is the first book I have read that attempts to examine the morphing national identities in today’s western democracies on an individual level. For Joanne and Richard, the tacking towards conservative nationalism and away from liberal democracy means Brexit, a severing of ties with Europe. This has practical implications in how their new film can be financed but they also question what it now means for them to be British. For them an essential part of Britishness are the ties to other European countries, the open and unhindered travel, the opportunities for work and exchange. An element of what it means to be British is being cut away, severed, by Brexit and it’s being denied to them by other Britons.

The foil or mirror (I’m not sure what the best descriptor here is) for these convolutes of identity, politics, intellectualism, art, is the subject of Richard’s screenplay - a biography of the intellectual Walter Benjamin.

I downloaded the Kindle version of Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings’ biography of Walter Benjamin years ago (on March 3, 2015 in fact) but never got around to reading it. Seeing that Day for Night was going to be a story of a filmmaker doing a film on Benjamin’s life, I decided to pull up the Eiland/Jennings book and read that first in order to better familiarize myself with him.

I’m glad I took that approach. Day for Night can stand entirely on its own. No knowledge of Benjamin’s scholarship or life is required to enjoy this novel. But readers who do have a pre-existing familiarity with Benjamin will pick up the homophony in the unfolding story, the lyrical or melodic notes from the Weimar intellectual underpin the melody carried by Richard and Joanne.

When I wrote my review of the Eiland/Jennings biography, I noted that the politics of Benjamin’s age, especially in the 1930s, were not dissimilar to the trending politics of today (the outcome of America’s presidential election notwithstanding). It was also so clear to me how closely Benjamin identified with being European and that this, as much as anything, muted the occasional spikes of urgency to flee Europe as fascism gained power and literally gained ground.

McNeil set a huge job for herself here, creating an artistic vehicle to expose and examine the contemporary, living history of our times. The musings and concerns of the characters in Day for Night echo my own thoughts and the conversations had or observed by friends and colleagues. At the end of the book I felt…dissatisfied, a lack. The dissatisfaction wasn’t to do with McNeil’s skill as a writer. On the contrary, rather the dissatisfaction was an extension of the dissatisfaction, the lack, I feel as I probe my own sense of national identity. America, in my mind, has meant inclusivity and acceptance. Now it means divisiveness and intolerance? That’s the messaging I am struggling with and dissatisfied by. And, like Richard and Joanne, I’m doing so at middle age, with all its attendant career pressures and health concerns but also with the comforts of having established a place for myself amd family, of having a home.

A thought-provoking read and one that made me glad to be a thinker, to be reminded that there are others for whom the occupation of walking and thinking, maybe writing, is a worthy use of one’s time.

Thank you, #netgalley, for the #dayfornight ARC.

I will start with the positives.

The basic set up of the novel is an indie film director Richard and his producer wife Joanna, set out in 2018 (based on Richard’s idea) to make a film about the German Jewish philosopher, critic and essayist Walter Benjamin. Richard casts in the role of Benjamin an androgynously attractive actor Elliott – ostensibly too young for the role but with a magnetism and intelligence which attracts Richard but professionally and even sexually.

Walter Benjamin fled Germany for France in 1933 only to be caught up in the World War – stripped of German citizenship then briefly interned as an enemy alien in France he then fled the German invasion for the US (via Spain) in 1940 only to commit suicide on arriving in Spain due to apparent fears of repatriation to the Nazis. The author herself joint curated an word and photographical exhibition on Benjamin and migration in 2018 – with the same names as this book (named in turn after a cinematic technique used to simulate shooting at nightime, but actually using a daytime shooting with underlighting).

The multiple concepts of the novel are fascinating: using the life and times of Benjamin to explore the themes of Brexit, of migrant crises and of the rise of populism; and drawing on the inspiration of Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando” for some of its approach.

The book is also very post-modern in many ways which I think would reveal more on a second read. As well as making a film – at many times the novel appears to be like a film – not just to the reader but also very consciously to the characters in the novel (who find themselves moving from one scene to another with a sudden cut, or experience conversation in film dialogue form). At one stage we are actually told (although by a character who in the ostensible narrative appears to be dead so shall we say fairly unreliable) that the film is actually about the making of the film. The author has noted in the Acknowledgments that the book itself was written in real time with the characters tracing much of her own actions in 2018 as she researched both the exhibition and the novel. From very early on Richard experiences Benjamin as an actual character alongside him – observing and commenting on 21st Century society and Richard’s actions. Later an imagined scene being filmed in which Benjamin (who in an alternative life made it to America) visits Hannah Arendt – actually begins with several pages written as if by Arendt. And so on.

And the writing is also great at times – for example here are some early scenes describing London (the first the opening of the novel).

"Early January. The pavements are coated with pine needles that have been ground into paste. Carcasses of Christmas trees wait to be carted away to the post festive charnel house ……. The monster of Winter is in residence, of course, along with the epic remorse that follows Christmas …

The City levers itself into wintry, estuarine mist. In the half-light of midday, bundles of unidentifiable creatures that might just be people propel themselves labouriously forward … The trees wave calligraphically to the sky

All around us another London is constructing itself in the sky, tended to by loving cranes bent double, soliciting skeletons of future buildings from the ground"

And on a final self-referential point – one of Richard’s previous films (both title and plot) is based on a novel “Everyone is Watching” by Megan Bradbury with very limited reviews on Goodreads but with the top review by me.

What about the negatives though – which I am afraid for me overshadowed the book.

Well to keep the film analogy the first is what seemed to be a series of bloopers – or at least things which undermined the credibility of the characters to an English reader. To give a couple of examples: when a character says “flat as a pancake” they are immediately asked where they are from (the answer being America) as “that’s not English” – except it’s a completely English phrase; another time Richard wears a flat cap that Joanna says makes him look like Tony Benn – except that would be the famous pipe smoking non-cap wearing Tony Benn.

And the second was the characters themselves and (again to use a film phrase) what motivated them.

The basic premise of the book as expressed by Richard and Joanna at some length is that Brexit is a cataclysmic event – Richard in particular apparently believing that 2018 may well be another 1939. At one point Joanna expresses her fear for when “the lorries are parked up to Croydon and people are stockpiling baked beans”.

And its fine to be opposed to Brexit – and I certainly voted Remain.

Except what we have here is a couple – the husband of who holds three passports, his mother some form of Italian count and his father owner of a 2-milion dollar house in Africa; the wife considerably more wealthy than him. They live in London and are obsessed with gentrification and the beneficial impact on property prices – but not (despite this being 2017) Grenfell Tower.

Despite all their privilege Brexit is apparently a plot by the rich (and elites) - of which they are victims.

It is also something which apparently involved criminal manipulation of democracy for which people should be tried in a court of law.

They seem to dislike most things about England and in particular England-not-London (Yorkshire for example is dismissed as being 40 years out of date, Norfolk apparently does not have a concept of air-conditioning). Their horror at Brexit is clearly and explicitly about how it might impact their ability to leave the UK and travel and settle where they want rather than to stay “on this s**hold of an island”, culminating in the self-pitying diatribe:

"The great reckoning to come, when the suspicious, lazy Britons who muttered in pubs against the Polish and Romanians and Jamaicans would be delivered their fate, which they themselves had voted for, and her – Nathan, Lucy [her children], Elliott, all blameless, but living among them – would be sacrificed too".

Now if the purpose of this was to hold up a mirror to Remainers – and say: see here is how you are seen, here is why people voted the way they did – then that would be important, but, at least as I read it that was not the purpose and the author’s acknowledgements express the same sentiments about fraud and plutocrats.

The author admits that a book written in 2018 and due to be published in May 2021 has rather been overtaken by history. Of course we have seen lorry parks and grocery-hoarding but Brexit caused neither. More seriously we have seen in America what can happen to democracy when intelligent people dismayed at a vote that went against them, throw around accusations of fraud and elite conspiracies, of future court reckonings, and try to overturn democratic votes in court.

My thanks to ECW for an ARC via NetGalley.