Dai Smith’s Dream On is a big book. At little over 300 pages, it’s no epic tome, but it’s big in the sense that its subject is huge. What’s it about? Well, everything – people, places, relationships, personal and social histories and how all of these things define us.Dream On is a composite novel comprising five seemingly unrelated stories unified by their theme: musings on life and the paths people take. From the fantastic opening of a dying man reflecting on his own obituary, to the homecoming soldier returning from war who closes the book, this is a novel of great characters, all of whom struggle with a sense of identity. Digger is the working-class hero of the local and national rugby team, constantly struggling with the conflict between his role at home as husband Richard and his legendary status in the local town as ‘Digger’; Billy is the ex-pat photographer living in New York whose sense of self is confused when he returns to the valleys to unravel a web of corruption that involves him, his father and his past; Marcus is the boy who never grew up whose lack of father means he defines himself by the books he reads and the films he watches. Although all the stories are independent of each other, they work together as a whole. At first the reader might be looking to tie together the individual strands of story, but it soon becomes clear that this isn’t the point. In fact the structure of the book is somewhat explained in the text when memory is described as a ‘jumble of relationships to be savoured, not a grid of relatives to be connected’. Later, when a character is wondering how history can be properly remembered, it’s decided that ‘structured narratives are a species of lie’. These snapshots of life fit together and the seemingly disjointed narratives work to tell the same story.Smith has a real skill in structuring his work and merging the personal and social into each of the stories. His skill in flitting back and forth in history and focusing simultaneously on individuals and their place in wider society is reminiscent of the great W. G. Sebald. Smith also matches Sebald’s ability to cram dark humour into a series of serious and sad situations – not a comparison that should be made lightly.Dream On really is a great book. It’s a book about life, people and places, but it’s also a book about stories and storytellers. It constantly reminds us that while we position ourselves in our own stories, we have no control over who we are in the stories of those around us and the roles we’re cast in by the places we’re from. Who we really are is a composite of these characters: the person we think we are and the person others see. Dream On cleverly looks at this duality of self through the eyes of vividly crafted characters in vastly differing scenarios from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This is a book that deserves to be read by all.
