#4. Lowercase Letters On The Spine – The Quality of Silence by Rosamund Lupton (Paperback)

I remember reading "Sister" by Rosamund Lupton in about 2010/2011 and being haunted by the ending; it was proper hairs on the arm tingling good. So good in fact, I immediately bought the next novel "Afterwards"…and then Lupton didn’t publish anything for a couple of years. Somehow, I missed this book when it was released in 2015 and it was only when I was searching through my bookcase and I spotted her two previous novels that I thought I would do a quick online search. I realised that two further books had been written, this one and one called "Three Hours." I bought them both and decided they would be shoehorned into this challenge because I was so excited to read them!

 

“On 24 November Yasmin and her ten-year-old daughter Ruby set off on a journey across Northern Alaska. They're searching for Ruby's father, missing in the arctic wilderness.

More isolated with each frozen mile they cover, they travel deeper into an endless night. And Ruby, deaf since birth, must brave the darkness where sight cannot guide her.

She won't abandon her father. But winter has tightened its grip, and there is somebody out there who wants to stop them.

Somebody tracking them through the dark.”

 

I genuinely could not put this book down. There really is something engaging about Lupton’s writing that engulfs you with a curiosity to know more from the moment you pick the book up. Just before chapter 1 starts, Ruby introduces herself. "My name is a shape not a sound. I am a thumb and fingers, not a tongue and lips. I am ten fingers raised old - I am a girl made of letters R-u-b-y And this is my voice." Immediately I was compelled to think about how different the world must be to a deaf person. This simple statement transported me into the world of how a deaf 10-year-old girl viewed things and I wanted to know more about her.

Ruby does not want to speak with her voice, however much her mother tries to encourage her. Instead, she prefers to use her voice-generating laptop, or to use her hands to sign her words. She understands others who use sign language, or if they articulate properly, she can read their lips. This means that in the dark, Ruby is effectively deaf and mute. Something to consider as the central characters move further and further north in the constant darkness of an Alaskan winter.

Yasmin's husband is a wildlife documentary maker who has spent the last few months working in the Arctic wilderness. Yasmin and Ruby were going to travel to Alaska to spend Christmas with him, however, he let slip that he kissed an Inupiaq woman. Yasmin drops everything to immediately travel with her daughter from the UK to Alaska to deliver an ultimatum she decides must be made face to face. Matt was due to meet them at the airport, but as they fly into Fairbanks, they are met by the police who confirm that there has been a catastrophic fire where Matt was staying and that there were no survivors. Yasmin refuses to believe her husband is dead, and so begins an epic journey north to find him.

As soon as I read the word "Fairbanks" I was immediately transported to the reality TV show Ice Road Truckers. It followed truck drivers negotiating the hazards of the remote Dalton Highway, a road commencing north of Fairbanks and ending at the Prudhoe Bay Oil Fields. This would not be the setting of a novel for the faint hearted, so Yasmin and Ruby make for a formidable, yet unlikely double act.

The book switches from Yasmin’s perspective (3^rd person) to Ruby's (1^st person) and therefore the narrative is unusual, especially in terms of the uniqueness offered by a deaf child. “It’s SUPER-COOLIO-AWESOME-SAUCE-BEAUTIFUL!!!” she states in a made-up language her and her friend Jimmy would understand (not so much a 50 something adult who would never think of stringing such a sentence together!) Yet Ruby’s emotions are raw and expressive and endearing; although I can imagine reading her expressions can become a little irritating to some bibliophiles.

Whilst in the main this is an unconventional, yet page turner, of a crime novel, you do need to suspend your belief quite a lot. Yasmin is an intelligent astrophysicist, therefore suddenly dragging your young daughter to Alaska so you can have an argument with your husband is one thing. “Borrowing” a mammoth truck and being able to drive it, especially on ice roads, with no training, daughter still in tow, is another. Having some maniac chase you in another truck, in the middle of a blizzard, on an ice road in a place where it is dark for sixty-seven days (yes SIXTY-SEVEN) is just completely insane, yet somehow the story still works. Some of the most beautiful parts of the book are the conversations between mother and daughter, as the confines of the truck allow them to confide in each other.

As our intrepid mother and daughter leave the Dalton Highway and head further north to the burnt-out village of Anaktue, they discover that the village had been located on an immense site of shale oil which was of interest to several fracking companies. Was this fire an unfortunate accident or were unethical morals at play to get people off the land? The story turns into a partial cli-fi novel, warning what happens if greed surpasses ethics or moral integrity.

“ ‘He said the oil is made by plants and animals that died in ancient seas,’ I say. ‘ It takes millions and millions of years and we are looters and hooligans, thieves from the future.’

 

He had been upset and cross.’They drill two miles down – two miles! – and then they go out sideways and crack the rock with poisons into bits so we can force out the gas or oil, and do you know what we do with the gas and oil that has taken millions of years to make, deep under the earth?’

 

‘Run a tumble dryer on a sunny breezy day? I said, knowing it would be something like this. Dad really doesn’t like tumble dryers.

‘Exactly. Or accelerate a car down a clear stretch of road. Millions of years…’ He waved his hands up in the air. ‘Gone in forty seconds.’

It was a clever twist on your ordinary psychological crime narrative, and it was sobering to hear how our planet’s larder is wasted by so many for so little reward. It highlighted how unethical global companies can be, all in the pursuit of money so that the rich can get richer and fill their lives with more and more shiny things because their lives have so little meaning.  

“The Quality of Silence” is such a perfect title for this book. Not only does it shine a light on how deaf people might see the world around them, but the Alaskan landscape is a place without the interruptive noise of the city, a place for people to enjoy quiet reflection on the beauty and brutality of mother nature. I really enjoyed the various layers to this book, the themes of feeling like an outcast, family relations, environmental issues and just the good old rollercoaster read of a good crime thriller. It was a thought-provoking read that makes me want to visit Alaska!

 

Genre: Thriller, Mystery, Suspense, Psychological Fiction, Domestic Fiction, Crime

Release Date: 31^st December 2015 (Paperback)

Publisher: Piatcus

Pages: 379

 

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