The Way the Day Breaks by David Roberts

David Roberts’ debut The Way The Day Breaks explores the impact of a father’s decline in mental health on himself and his family. The novel’s form and style are innovative and challenging, creating a dizzying and rich narrative journey, shifting between the family’s present, lived experiences and the youngest sibling Michael’s retrospective memories of the past.

The novel opens with the family’s drive home to Yorkshire from a camping holiday in France. What we might expect to be a mundane conversation quickly exposes us to the first of the father’s (named Sinclair) schemes, starting with his plans to turn his family into a religion. Sinclair’s suggestions are illogical, focusing on financial gains and plans for Michael to dig a pond as a place of worship. These schemes expose Sinclair’s separations from logic and reality, further seen in plans to move to Antarctica, or his sudden project to re-build an old car from scratch.

As the narrative progresses, Roberts paints an increasingly more detailed picture of the tensions and pressures which Sinclair’s mental decline has on his family and those around him. We see the pain felt by his unnamed wife, with her perspective provided in the form of letters. Much like her often backtracked speech, the letters include several sentences which have been crossed out, but preserved in the book. This further exposes the complexities and confusion of her thoughts and feelings. A particularly poignant episode occurs when Sinclair keeps his wife up all night, convinces her to take a day off from her job as teacher, and take the children out of school to go on a drive. On their journey, Sinclair insists on picking up a hitchhiker, whose perspective we do not receive explicitly in the book, but whose discomfort we can derive from his swift exit from the vehicle before Sinclair can drive him up the road. As tensions build, we eventually learn that Sinclair’s wife has long suffered, Sinclair having been sectioned several times, including during her pregnancy.

Roberts also provides us with Michael’s perspective, in the form of memories narrated retrospectively from adulthood. We are only situated in Michael’s adult life at the end of the novel, when we learn he is living on the coast doing hospitality shift work, after claiming to have failed as a poet. We first encounter Michael’s narration with repeated sentences opening with ‘I remember’ to recount his memories. This is particularly disorientating, because the reader is not fully situated in the place from which Michael makes his retrospective reflections. Indeed, this allows Roberts to further displace the reader, mirroring the confusion symptomatic of Sinclair’s decline. Roberts’ writing encapsulates the disorientating nature of memory, wherein Michael’s memories are fragmentary and triggered by different objects and events. This is seen in the closing of the book where Michael is transported back into the past by a memory of a ‘Hot Set’ he fought over with his siblings. Michael’s perspective is heart breaking and illuminating, illustrating both the isolation he felt as a child, and the ways in which he uses poetry as a means of reconciling his past.

The novel is moving and beautifully innovative. Roberts has provided an honest exploration of the strength of love under the pressures of mental illness, illustrating both shared family, and individual experiences. The book is deeply complex, and I was most impressed with Roberts’ ability to explore trauma, grief and healing through the character of Michael. This has now been promoted to my current favourite novel, and I cannot recommend it more.

Thank you to Neil at Weatherglass Books for my copy of the book.

You can purchase The Way The Day Breaks from Weatherglass Books: https://weatherglassbooks.com/shop/the-way-the-day-breaks