What are they for? To acknowledge an inspiration, and by doing so to suggest how a new story may follow the lines of an old story.
This novel's epigraphs are set on their own pages and cannot but demand our attention. It also tells us of the difficulty of accepting the ordinary satisfaction of days: "They are to be happy in," asserts the gloomy poet. The poem is connected to the pattern of the novel, with its year-by-year revisiting of the same single day. Including it here seems an authorial declaration of purpose. It seems to describe how dissatisfaction with the quotidian repetitiousness of life brings those ministers to our dissatisfaction, "the priest and the doctor … Running over the fields". The phrasing is characteristic of Larkin: at once colloquial and odd-sounding self-evident yet puzzling. "Where can we live but days?" the poem asks. To say more would explain too much.Īt the front of the book we find printed the whole of a short poem by Philip Larkin, "Days". The reader who turns to it before reading the novel will spoil his or her enjoyment of the plot the reader who reaches it at the right moment will experience a narrative frisson. The last of these is from Tess of the d'Urbervilles (which Nicholls has adapted for TV) and does indeed explain the "debt". "A debt is owed to Thomas Hardy, for unwittingly suggesting the premise and some clumsily paraphrased prose in the final chapter." There are six epigraphs in the novel: one at the front of the book, and one at the head of each of its five parts. Any reader of One Day sharing this habit will be put on the trail of a teasing reference to the work of a great 19th-century novelist. I have the bad habit of reading a novel's Acknowledgements first of all, even if printed at the back of the book.
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