The Quiet: In a Silenced World, What Would You Do to Keep Your Child Safe?

‘You have no idea what I’ve had to do to keep him safe…’.
Isaac is Hannah’s entire world. She knows that her son is gifted, and that those gifts make him vulnerable. To keep him safe, she spends every waking moment by his side. If she lets her guard down, lets him out of her sight, lets him show what he’s capable of, he will be taken from her.

When the Soundfield arrived twenty years ago, the world changed with it. Now, people are forced to live at night due to the deadly heat of the day, food and water are scarce, and everyday life is punctuated by the constant and disconcerting hum from the Field. A brilliant scientist, Hannah spent her early career working on the enigma of the Soundfield, looking for answers; now, resigned, she has focussed all her energies on keeping Isaac living, not just alive.

To do so, she will have to lie to the people she knows and hope she can trust the ones she doesn’t. Because the only thing more dangerous than her lies, is the truth of what she’s done.

This is an intriguing book that has something of the air of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road , John Lanchester’s The Wall and Andrew Hunter Murray’s The Last Day in its imaging of a dystopian future where a world wide crisis has generated both a flood of refugees and a rampantly authoritarian government.

The Premise

Martin’s intriguing premise reminded me of John Wyndam’s Day of the Triffids in that there are two distinct elements or plot novum that combine to drive the narrative. Wyndam had the motile carnivorous triffids combined with the stellar light show that blinded most of the world’s population – to create his nightmare contemporary world. Martin has the arrival of the Soundfield a strange ultra-high altitude atmospheric blanket encasing the world, that emits music while driving up daytime temperatures, stripping away ultra-violet light protection and yet emitting strange musical rhythms and sequences. Alongside this high altitude strange – potentially alien – intrusion into our world, Martin imagines a rediscovery of an ancient proto language embedded in the genes of some people, capable of being awoken and which is expressed musically (Martin’s acknowledgments point out a debt of inspiration owed to Steven Milhen’s book The Singing Neanderthals).  Where Wyndam’s two novums combined in the hideous vulnerability of the blinded populace to the lethal triffids, Martin’s converge on the musicality of this rediscovered proto-language and the potential to communicate in some way with the suffocating Soundfield.

As with Wyndam’s collapse in social order, Martin imagines a world that has not responded well to the crisis caused by the Soundfield. There are some parallels with the climate crisis and its likely outrun as rising temperatures render huge swathes of the globe uninhabitable and drive a flood of refugees to the shores of his protagonist’s unnamed country (but it feels like South-East England). The government response is to slide into authoritarianism with executions of protesters and the unchecked slaughter of refugees as they arrive on the country’s shores. Alongside this is the forced adoption of any child showing a glimmer of gift in the musical proto-language to take part in ‘the programme.’  The implication is that these linguistically musical children are to be used in some effort to communicate with the Soundfield.

In this fraught environment our protagonist Dr Hannah Newman tries to shield her linguistically musical son Isaac from being discovered and taken by the authorities. A task that is complicated by the way the linguistic talent goes hand I hand with a kind of autistic spectrum disorder where Isaac is musical but non-verbal, with an instinct to sing at a time when the Soundfield has made everybody else avoid such activity.

Worldbuilding

Martin captures a grim dystopian overlaid on a familiar city scape of tower blocks, grey brick university buildings, and cramped tube trains. I recently heard Bill Bailey describing the difference between playing the US National anthem in its intended major key, or reworked in a minor key. That fascinating difference of tone and effect is similar to the way Martin’s vision of a world we could live in is at once recognisable yet also darker – not least because the hazards of daylight have forced people into nocturnal living – making ‘the switch.’  Venturing out in daytime requires protective UV suits, Hannah’s mother – having ignored the dangers – is now in the grip of terminal cancer. Suspected criminals or protesters can be shot on sight, but people still travel to work. Hannah lectures at a college on her former specialism, genetics and linguistics, which allows Martin to feed in some fascinating facts (they certainly feel like facts) about the genetic mutations and switches that facilitated the development of human language. Isaac accompanies his mother to work and stays in a colleague’s office while she lectures, but the authorities intrude into academia – much sadly as current US authorities seem to be intruding into the inner workings and decisions of Columbia University – so that nowhere is ever safe, for a child who sings too much and never speaks, just signs for communication.

Curiously for all the brutality of the regime, the surveillance of the state is surprisingly limited, its capacity diminished by crisis to something more like World War II Amsterdam than the micro-tracked reality of our current environment. This does at least give Hannah and Isaac the chance to find some places and people of refuge.

Characters

The story focuses on Hannah how her family and the secrets of her past shape her actions in the present. The mystery of Isaac’s father is a running theme. At first I had thought the character named Theo must be the one – but he is quickly revealed as Hannah’s brother from who she has grown politically and morally estranged as he sought service in the border force.  Martin gifts his characters with some sadly far too recognisable attitudes for example in Theo’s opinion of the refugees.

During lunch, Theo argued with them about taking in refugees, saying it was unsustainable to house people and that it wasn’t our job to help them. “They’ll get used to the comfort and won’t want to leave,” he said. “They’ll have to go back where they came from eventually.” He spoke in cliches.

Isaac, being non-verbal, is described through his actions and sign language, but it does give Martin scope for one of his many elegant descriptions of language.

He’s never spoken a word in his life, but he has more control over his voice than anyone I’ve met. If you’ve only ever spoken German, or Japanese, or Afrikaans, your mouth and muscles are formed around that language like tree roots wrapped around rock. That’s what it’s like for Isaac. His voice is musical because music is his language.

Prose

Martin spears his parallel dystopian world with fine prose that pins it in the reader’s mind and eye.

When sitting with her ill mother

I know there have been times when Mum has been happy since her diagnosis, I sometimes see it in her eyes when she talks about Theo or when she looks at me, but those moments are becoming rarer, like she’s spent all her hope.

When reflecting on the utter marvellous magic of human DNA

Our DNA is a time capsule not only because we can use it to trace our ancestry, but because genes that may have been supressed for thousands or even millions of years of evolution have the potential to be reactivated.

And when considering the limitations of language – the way words are really just the audible shadow of far less effable feelings

All language fails in some way. How can you say what it feels like to love someone? How can you say what it’s like to feel guilty? It’s all messy, disturbed, memories played over and over in your mind, burnt out like a videotape replayed too many times.

Plot

The plot is essentially in the subtitle ‘what would you do to keep your child safe’ and Hannah is forced to answer that question multiple times as Isaac’s talent attracts the interest of the authorities and she needs to find new friends and old colleagues.  But alongside the present time of the story, Martin weaves a narrative of past events – Hannah’s childhood with Theo in pre-Soundfield days, her entry into research particularly around linguistics and the way that a different specialism can give a new angle and new impetus in research on an otherwise exhausted field.

The two threads converge in a compelling ending which reveals some surprising truths as well as the answer to the question posed in the title.

So a fun read in a potential sci-fi-linguistics subgenre (eg the 2016 film Arrival based on Ted Chiang’s short story The Story of your life). It’s a theme that is ripe for investigation by other authors.

The Quiet is available now – you can order your copy HERE