A History of Silence (Lloyd Jones, Text Publishing)

Lloyd Jones lives in Wellington, but when an earthquake devastates Christchurch he is asked by the BBC to write about it. Feeling unable to ‘speak for all’, he declines. Instead, his response to the disaster is this memoir. Observing the numbered stones of a cathedral in the wrecked city, Jones wonders whether he might ‘recover something of my own past, and reassemble it in the manner of the basilica’. The ‘stones’ he has to work with are few: he knows his father was orphaned as a child, his mother’s father was a farmer, and her mother ‘made a choice between her man … and her four-year-old daughter and gave mum away’. These family ‘facts’ do not form as solid a foundation as Jones believes, and his investigations eventually require a new understanding of them. Despite this, Jones’ memoir does not read as a mystery, so much as a stream-of-consciousness examination of his memories of childhood and the post-earthquake city, which stands as a metaphor for his ‘history of silence’, having ‘grown out of a deliberate forgetting of what it sat on’. The solemn pace and associative narrative will not suit those hoping for a page-turning family whodunit, but poetically observed detail and an affecting evocation of the past will reward readers interested in the way our history (even, or especially, that which we don’t know about) can shape us—and the memoir will no doubt appeal to fans of the award-winning author’s fiction.

Matthia Dempsey is on maternity leave from Books+Publishing 

Books+Publishing pre-publication reviews are supported by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund.

Category: Reviews