Taking It Personally

A History of Silence: A Memoir
by Lloyd Jones
Text, 2013, 273 pages, $32.99

The terrible earthquakes in Christchurch in 2010 and 2011 changed the physical and emotional landscape of a city, and of a country. And many people who were geographically distant from the catastrophe (like Lloyd Jones in Wellington, and me in Melbourne) found themselves wrenched askew by a profound and unsettling empathy.

I was mesmerised by the almost slow-motion, blow-by-blow clarity of Jones’s description of how he apprehended the full import of what was happening down south. Beginning—“How strange to find it was ourselves, rather than the foreign victims we were more used to, fleeing the smoke and dust of disaster.”

He was sitting on the edge of his chair, in front of the television screen, remote in hand, nodding dumbly, as he was importuned over the phone by an expat BBC radio producer to write something about what the country was going through.

“Was it that day, or the day after?”

Time does move strangely when you struggle with the shock of dislocation. It leaps, it creeps, it turns back on itself. It folds into intricate shapes like a work of origami. It spirals like a strand of DNA. The DNA trope is telling, because the main thrust of the book is following the writer as he climbs back up his family tree searching for his true progenitors. 

Jones decided that he couldn’t write a piece to be read out on radio—“How could one speak for all?” But he had been surprised by a bunch of personal memories surfacing—“as though flushed up from the unsettled sediment within”. He had been shaken loose, and thrown off balance, and remembered things that had long been buried under the weight of silence.

Lloyd Jones is an experienced and skilful writer. Most recently I read his novel Mister Pip, and I liked it a lot. It had charm, and pathos, it created a world I could believe in. But after reading this book, this memoir, I realised that a novel can be a fortress, which conceals and protects the inelegant, painful, shameful, live quivering nub of a human consciousness. A novel is a construct. But that’s all right, we need them. We need these Bastilles of the human spirit, in the same way that we need town halls, and train stations, and cathedrals, and department stores and apartment blocks, and family dwellings on quarter-acre blocks. That’s how we get by, day by day. And then, our comfortable world is rocked and tilted and falls down around our ears.

I am not saying that this isn’t an elegant book. It is. It moves suavely, and sinuously, between extremes of national emergency and personal epiphany. There is a comforting formality in the tone the writer takes, even as he tells you (almost) everything.

I don’t want to tell you the story: it is a very good story. Read the book for the story. I became anxious that the personal journey Lloyd Jones was pursuing would be a cul de sac and he would have to resort to a relinquishing trope for the climax of his drama. But I like to become anxious, as I read, I like to be uncertain, and will the hero on in his quest. And what an apotheosis he discovered!

It was much like me finding out my Italian great-grandmother and her Irish husband had been prosecuted for putting arsenic in the soup in an attempt to kill her father and stepmother in Island Bay in 1885. (The case was found not proven. Someone had certainly put arsenic in the soup, but there was no way of proving who had done it.) So I was ready for a court transcript. And I was happy for Lloyd Jones that it was just a “domestic”—though undoubtedly a domestic of the more egregious kind.  

I certainly took this book very personally. I knew it would have to be close to home as I picked it up. Lloyd Jones and I were both born and raised in Wellington, we are more or less coevals, and we have both been wrestling with the events in Christchurch and their aftermath. But on page 4 I became quite rigid with intense particularity as I read—“I am writing these notes from the top floor of an old shoe factory in inner-city Wellington.”

I was staying with a friend in one of the flats in the old shoe factory in 2011, as my mother took her chance to die while I was in the country trying to launch my book of poetry (This City). This was, of course, a crucial and shattering time for me, and the urbane configuration of the flats in the old shoe factory became stamped on my psyche as a place where your world shifts on its axis.

It would be interesting to know how The History of Silence might seem to someone who was not an insider. Because the narration is so lucid, and formally organised, I do not think it would be off-putting or difficult. As I write this I realise Jones adeptly explains what might not be common knowledge:

As a child I wore shoes manufactured in this same building. Then, it would have been unthinkable that one day a suburban kid like me would end up living in a factory, let alone in the city.

Uh huh, I was thinking as I read that passage. I know how that thing came to pass. I thought of my father’s wooden box factory in what is now the DFO area in Rongotai near the airport. It has been pulled down and where it was is now the carpark for Bunnings. As I say, I could not help but take this book very personally. It was a gift to me. I understood myself, as I was reading, and where I came from, and I don’t think I have ever felt so inside my own culture and language. It was like reading Denis Glover or Janet Frame or Alan Mulgan or Keri Hulme.

A History of Silence is a wonderful book. It is measured and judicious, it is brave and bravura. It rings, like crystal, with an honest effort to be honest.