It is difficult to think of a more seasonally inappropriate novel to read this summer than Rosamund Lupton’s The Quality of Silence. As we swelter under July skies, her central characters drive further and further north of the Arctic circle, contending with temperatures of minus 55 and violent snow storms amid the constant darkness of the Alaskan winter.
Yasmin has flown to Fairbanks with an ultimatum for her wildlife documentary-maker husband, Matt. He has been working for months in the Arctic night, has slipped, she thinks, into a relationship with an Inupiaq woman (“I kissed her because I missed you”). He comes home, or their marriage is over. She has brought their daughter with her; Ruby is 10 years old and completely deaf.
But the two are met at the airport not by Matt, but by a policeman, who tells them that the village of Anaktue, where Matt has been living, has been burned to the ground following a fire, the entire population of 23, plus one Caucasian, wiped out. Matt is dead, Yasmin is told. She is given his wedding ring, which was found at the scene by a state trooper. She is told of the exhaustive, fruitless search of the area for survivors. There is no chance he is alive. She doesn’t believe it. And she decides to set out, with Ruby, across the Alaskan tundra, through utterly inimical terrain, to find him.
Lupton is the author of Sister, the fastest-selling debut novel by a British author of 2010. The Quality of Silence is her third novel, and there are many things to love about it, not least its stunning evocation of the stark, beautiful Alaskan wilds. “She’d seen cold as a predator, made of the dark, as if it were alive. But she felt it now as vastly, cruelly impersonal; a frozen darkness absorbing you into itself. She felt it filling her hollow spaces, embedding itself as icy marrow in her bones,” Lupton writes. And “out here there were no days, no turning of the Earth to reach the face of the sun, but a dark night of the soul in which only violent storms broke time into different pieces”.
The tension builds as Yasmin, Ruby in tow, commandeers a vast truck and attempts to drive the hundreds of miles to Deadhorse, and then Anaktue, along the Dalton Highway. She discovers that Anaktue was sitting on hundreds of thousands of barrels of shale oil, that it was a site of huge interest for fracking companies. She notices a pair of blue lights behind her on the icy road, which stop when she stops, go when she goes. Her fear mounts. And then a storm with hurricane-force winds rolls in.
Lupton tells her story from Yasmin’s perspective, in the third person, and from Ruby’s, in the first, alternating between the two. It’s an intriguing choice, which can work well; we see the layers of Yasmin’s and Matt’s relationship, how it began and built and fractured. And Ruby is a distinctive narrator – friendless and bullied at her mainstream school, because it’s bad enough being bright, let alone deaf, she has recently discovered that she can be herself online. Yasmin, meanwhile, is trying to make her “use your words, Ruby”, rather than signing; Ruby can’t make her understand that her silence is who she is.
Sometimes Lupton pulls off Ruby’s tangled ball of emotions well; sometimes her child’s voice grates horribly. “It’s SUPER-COOLIO-AWESOME-SAUCE-BEAUTIFUL!!!” she tells us at one point. It can be hard, too, to suspend disbelief long enough to accept that an intelligent woman would drag her much-loved daughter into a wilderness where she is highly likely to die, even with all Yasmin’s protestations of love for Matt and guilt about what she’s doing to Ruby. The truckers call her “gutsy lady”; there are less complimentary ways of describing what she does.
For all that, though, once she’s out there ice-road trucking, and once Ruby’s awesome saucing settles down, The Quality of Silence is an elegant and icily unique thriller: you won’t read anything like it this year. I’ll bet it leaves you (like me) longing for a trip to Alaska, even if you don’t plan on swiping a truck once you’re there.
The Quality of Silence is published by Little, Brown (£14.99). Click here to buy it for £11.99
