Day One, Abigail Dean, UK, 2024
In the small village of Stonesmere in the Lakes District it is the end of term, and the Day One concert performance at the primary school is underway. It is called Day One because it is aimed at the four-year-olds who will be starting school after the summer break; as the headmaster likes to say, the concert could be seen as their first day at school. But Day One takes on a completely different interpretation when a shooter appears from nowhere and kills eleven people – children and adults. It is the day when Stonesmere changes for ever.
Well planned and written, Day One is made up of short chapters that give information relating to that dreadful day (and the following eight years) from the viewpoints of several of the people who were in some way connected to what happened, but especially through the eyes of the main character, Martha (Marty) Ward. Although the chapters do not follow a strict chronological timeline, I did not find this a problem as the heading of each chapter makes the time period perfectly clear. In other words the story is built up gradually from small haphazard pieces taken from the past and the present, reflecting the grief, the anxiety and even the guilt – imagined or real – of the different characters.
Marty Ward has her own interpretation of what happened, and over the days, months and years it becomes the only interpretation, until suddenly it isn’t.
This is a thought-provoking book wrapped around a horrendous act – the shooting of school children. Dean does not dwell unnecessarily on the actual act but forces the reader to engage with the psychological impact on those directly involved, on the psyche of the small village and, indeed, its effect further afield as ‘truthers’ and conspiracy fanatics take hold of the narrative. Definitely a book for the twenty-first century where conspiracy theories can be spun around everything and anything.
It is not a happy book, but Dean puts forward some interesting ideas about how we lie to ourselves to create a fiction with which we can relate, and how conspiracy theorists lie to everyone in order to make themselves seem important.