One of the immediately striking things about The Dawning (by Megan Taylor) is its present tense narrative, naturally enforcing the frenetic pace of the story and leading the reader into the unknown along with the narrators.
Set in a wintry backdrop of the Peaks, on New Year’s Eve, it tells the story of the Haywood family, who, one by one are inwardly crumbling with the pressure of family and their own lives. With great insight, Taylor weaves the multiple perspectives of each member, meticulously, and so creates a fuller picture of the level of disconnection found within this particular family, and with each reader will identify and empathise:
Stella, the mother with young baby Mia, suffering from post-natal depression. Philip, the father – at the cusp of a mid-life crisis, looking for pleasure elsewhere with tragi-comic results. Nicola – the teenage daughter, shy, unsure, lacking-in-confidence desperately trying to fit in and emulate her more glamorous friend, Christine. And 11-year-old Zac, in some ways the most sensible of the lot, acutely aware of his family falling to pieces and in his own child-like, protective way fighting against this.
This multiple perspective has echoes of Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, where we get to know each character a lot more intimately, than if it was a simple, straightforward narrative. It also alerts us to the unreliability of the narrators. On the one hand, by Stella’s account, we see Nicola as a beautiful, young teenager. Nicola disagrees, in a heart-wrenching but typically teenage body-dysmorphic way. In her descriptions of herself she is ‘dowdy’, ‘more like a fishwife’ and with ‘clothes […] safe and uninspired’.
Taylor’s unravelling story is so compelling, because we are left, on cliff-hangers constantly catching up with the characters own moral dilemmas in the backdrop of a claustrophobic home, a sophisticated party, a teenage-get together in the woods. We don’t know and we want to know. The Dawning has cinematic overtones – not only in its suspense, but the sheer quality of the pictures it creates:
‘Yapping and growling, the animals’ dark, glistening bodies had tumbled over and into one another as they reeled and snapped against her legs. For a moment, they had seemed more like giant rats than dogs, like nightmare creatures – or pieces of the night itself…’
I read The Dawning in one sitting. It wouldn’t surprise me if you did too.
The Dawning by Megan Taylor is published by Weathervane Press. Megan’s blog is at http://megantaylorblogstories.blogspot.com
