T.G. Engle - Silent Dawn (2017)

 

It began life back in 1993 as a play and was rewritten as a novel in 2017, which explains my initial impression being that of a recently revised early novel. Before it occurs to anyone that I may mean early novel in dismissive terms - given that Silent Dawn is also self-published - I should clarify that it does certain things which first efforts tend to do in so much as that the narrative has a loose, somewhat improvised feel and we seem to get a lot of new characters complete with physical descriptions introduced before anything has really started moving. With hindsight I can see some of this may be the trail left by the journey from stage to page - a journey which, I hasten to add, makes a lot of sense given the sheer geographical range of this thing

Beyond these details, Silent Dawn reads like a self-published early novel by someone who really knows how to write. There's a minor issue with formatting, the indention of paragraphs and where it occurs, which I gather is pretty much standard for anyone self-publishing from Microsoft documents; and it's distracting, but not so much as to detract from a novel which otherwise writhes with confidence. As for the usual crimes of the self-published - inactive non-sentences, inept grammar or spelling, absence of proofing, crowd pleasing pop culture references, narrative developments which would transparently prefer to have been on telly, and so on and so forth - we suffer nothing of the sort in this book. Particularly impressive is that in Pastor Stanshall we have an irredeemable monster who, without ever becoming even remotely sympathetic, is easily understood; so his evil - which is the optimum strength fully leaded version - is  believable where, in less capable hands, it could easily have slipped over into pantomime. There are many finely struck balancing acts going on here, which I suspect I only even noticed through having read at least a couple of novels by authors who weren't up to the job.

Silent Dawn is a hard-boiled satire set amongst warring factions of the US population about a thousand years from now. It's not exactly post-apocalypse, but civilisation is a thing of the past and daily life is otherwise about as bad as it can possibly be - rape, pillage, no law, few utilities despite the government still being hidden away somewhere, and a shitload of praising Jesus while passing ammunition. It's like William Burroughs' take on Mick Norman's Hell's Angel books, directed by John Waters, soundtrack by Motorhead - but better. There isn't a whole lot of rib-tickling, and yet it's darkly funny throughout; and certain caricatures which rarely amount to anything more than a groanfest of recycled clichés - not least evangelical preachers and good ol' boys - are delivered as readable and even wildly entertaining, which is a rare thing in my experience. Whatever I read, as soon as the Texan shows up, I'm usually about thirty pages from throwing it across the room and switching to something else, which didn't happen this time.