Stephanie Jones: Book Review - The Quality Of Silence by Rosamund Lupton

For a novel set in storm-blown Alaska and featuring a mother and young daughter on a seemingly hopeless wilderness pursuit of a husband and father they have been assured is dead, Rosamund Lupton’s The Quality of Silence has a remarkably firm embrace. Warmth might be taking it a bit too far: the landscape is a character all its own, desolate and deadly, and the cold – minus-50 Celsius in the thick of a storm – “shocking in its violence.” The effect is one both claustrophobic (a core location is the cab of a 40-ton rig) and expansive, inviting a glimpse into the void of “eighty-eight thousand square miles of nothin’”, in the words of a state truckie.

 Yasmin Alfredson, who journeys from the United Kingdom to retrieve her husband Matt from an Arctic research station where he is making a wildlife film, is confronted abruptly with the ill-advisedness of her decision to set out for the frozen north with 10-year-old Ruby: “She’d thought the colour of cold was white, like snow, or blue perhaps, like on a cold tap, but cold like this was conceived in a place without daylight and was black, the absence of all light and colour.”

 An environment consumed by snow and ice is also silent, an element to which Yasmin and Ruby have no trouble adjusting. Witty, clever and preternaturally intuitive, Ruby is profoundly deaf and long accustomed to straddling the ‘real’ world, with which she communicates through lip-reading, signing and voice technology, and the ‘typed’ world – Twitter, Facebook, blogging – where her deafness is imperceptible and she can “properly be me”.

 Ruby’s attunement to the moods and cares of adults may be a consequence of her deafness and is undoubtedly, in the cat-and-mouse game Lupton sets up, the source of what salvation can be found in one of the most inhumane settings on Earth. In that respect, Lupton demands some suspension of disbelief. The reader must accept that a mother would willingly endanger her child’s life for the sake of little more than fantasy, and that Alaska’s endless northern tundra is a place confined enough for two people to chance upon one another.

 In unifying an environmental horror story – The Quality of Silence offers a caution about fracking and the rapacious evils of Big Oil – a love-conquers-all family drama and a thrilling flight from a putative villain in an 18-wheeler, Lupton attempts to do a hell of a lot, and mostly succeeds. Where she stuns and delights is in the personality of Ruby, a heroine in the purest sense, whose energy and intelligence anchors the narrative and lends plausibility to the prolonged, desperate chase sequence that dominates the latter two-thirds of the book.

 Though there is much from which Ruby is protected, notably the authorities’ belief that her father was killed in an explosion that destroyed a remote, untouched village, her perceptiveness is only heightened by the unforgiving environment and her conviction that her father’s assessment is correct: “He says that it’s not that I’m deaf but that I hear quietness.”

 As an only child who is aware that her parents’ marriage is not on stable ground, Ruby bears witness on the reader’s behalf, and her eloquence and wisdom give her standing alongside some recent great literary youths, among them Jonathan Safran Foer’s Oskar Schell and Mark Haddon’s Christopher John Francis Boone.