Collective memories ... RAF pilots during the second world war. Photograph: PA
All wars turn into stories, but ultimately - however collective the battle - we seem to want to hear those stories from our own. That was my conclusion after hearing AL Kennedy talk about her Costa prizewinner, Day, before a largish crowd at Hay on a dismally rainy night.
In America this novel - the story of a second world war RAF gun turret fighter - has been reviewed positively, with an occasional sniffle. In Britain, it has won a major award and the deeply felt collective memory it tapped into was apparent at Hay.
Several audience members were RAF pilots or had known someone who was. One man claimed an uncle and a father in the service. During the conversation it was so quiet you could hear the rain on the tent roof.
"I am glad you are willing to flirt with us still," said one of these pilots, after Kennedy described a visit to an old airstrip, where she met with an old RAF fighter. "But there were two things you got absolutely right," the man continued. One had to do with the chaos of putting together a crew. The other involved the smell of taking off under heavy flak. Kennedy replied that she just had a lucky guess.
The rightness of a novelist's guesswork and intuition is part of what makes her great. So why can't these guesses translate across borders? For first world war you read Pat Barker, while in America we still rely on Erich Marie Remarque. For second world war we turn to big boozy V-8 powered novels like Catch-22 and From Here to Eternity, while you have the exquisite Remains of the Day. Britain gave America probably the best Vietnam novel of all - The Quiet American - in 1957, but we still went to war.
I am not arguing these books do not crossover from Britain to America or the other way; it's just their reception depends upon the context in which they are read. Before a crowd of mostly older, un-rain-deterred British readers, the enormous amount of research Kennedy had done for Day had a resonant, sobering effect. The resurrection of this lived memory, for the audience, seemed the point of the book. No one asked about her use of the second person voice, or the metafictional quandaries of putting a film into a novel.
And Kennedy didn't bring either up - but rather focused on the grim facts her research turned up, the things the book has to represent without telling it to the reader. Roughly 50 per cent of RAF bombers did not return, she explained. They had lucky LPs, suits, flight mates. If they saw the day at the end of a run - and here explains the title - they knew they'd probably survive, as they were over England. Some of them saw ghosts afterwards. Some of them apparently loved it.
That we know now - thanks to books like AC Grayling's Among the Dead Cities and Nicholson Baker's recent Human Smoke - that aerial bombing campaigns were poorly designed, with hideous disregard for civilian life, targeting it deliberately later in ways that actually undermined the war, doesn't reduce the tragedy of a story like Kennedy's.
In fact, it only makes the deaths she describes seem more senseless - an idea Kennedy, who clearly believes aerial bombing, and war in general, are wrong, tried to massage. "I don't mind airmen, but I don't like airplane hangers," she said.
In the US, the National Endowment for the Arts in America is currently doing a book swap big read with foreign countries - from Egypt to the Czech Republic, possibly with England, too. It would seem the next big step, beyond shipping the books, would be to mix up the audience members for a discussion - to have them in the same room. That way, when it comes to discussing a book about war, perhaps a little less will be lost in translation, even when we're speaking the same language.
