Silence

"Again, another very short book. Even shorter than Jekyll and Hyde. I first came across Kennaway’s novels in the 1980s when they were reissued in new editions. He’s probably best known for his first novel, Tunes of Glory , which was made into a very successful film with Alec Guinness and John Mills. That was about life in a Scottish regimental barracks in Perth. It really made his name. It was published in 1956. He went on to write another half dozen novels. Unfortunately he was killed in a car crash in 1968, when he was 40. If he were still alive, he would be in his nineties, the Grand Old Man of Scottish literature. But in some respects he sits slightly outside Scottish literature, because he moved away. He went to London, then Europe for a while, America briefly. So his novels are unquestionably Scottish, that’s where his roots are, but he also writes about other people in other places. This novel, Silence , was published after his death, in 1972. It wasn’t quite finished, but they managed to piece it together. It’s based in an unnamed American city, loosely based on Chicago. It addresses the issue of race, and the division between the poor urban black population and the middle-class, wealthier, white population. A young white woman, it’s said, has been raped by a black man, and a group of men, members of her family and their friends, make a vigilante raid into the area of the city where the black population lives to try to capture the culprit. The whole thing goes horribly wrong, a riot erupts, and a man—the girl’s father-in-law, a doctor—gets separated from the people he’s with, goes into hiding in an empty building where he is guarded and saved from being lynched by a mysterious black woman who doesn’t speak. She’s an extraordinary, almost a mythical, figure. He calls her Silence. For some reason she protects him, but at a dreadful cost to herself. Somebody reading it now would say, well, yes, this is definitely written from a white, middle-class point of view. Nevertheless it seems to me a powerful, powerful book, in spite of its brevity. Near the end, there is a scene in which the doctor tries to save Silence from retribution. She is bleeding profusely and he says, ‘Notice the blood, it is also red.’ To me, the novel says, we’re all human beings. It’s very perceptive for the times it was written in and perhaps prophetic in some ways as well. I think what’s changed is that it’s much more possible to be a writer and stay in Scotland. A couple of generations ago, if you were really trying to make it in the publishing world, the pressure to go to London, or somewhere else, was immense. It’s possible to stay in Scotland now and make a living. It’s not easy, unless you happen to be very, very successful, but it’s possible in a way that perhaps it wasn’t a few years ago. Another thing: Scottish literature has burgeoned. I was a bookseller in the 1980s and 1990s. You used to be able to fit the entirety of ‘Scottish literature’, as it was in print, onto about three shelves—poetry, fiction, you name it. Now that’s impossible. There’s no way you can keep up with all the new Scottish writing. There’s so much of it. Prose, poetry, fiction, nonfiction, crime fiction… there’s just a tsunami of writing coming out of Scotland. Inevitably some of it will not last, and some of it will end up forgotten, and have to be rediscovered. But we’re in a very different place. Scottish literature was not really regarded as of great significance or distinction a generation or two ago, but that’s changed, and people by and large, and certainly within Scotland, think of ‘Scottish literature’ as having its own entity, not just as an adjunct to English literature. I’ve been thinking about it for about five years, so it’s taken a while for it to come together. I wanted to write a novel that was set in one place, but that took place over a huge amount of time. So I invented this glen, Glen Conach, which is, in my head, not far from where I live. There are three stories going on: the story of Conach himself, an 8th-century Christian missionary to the Picts who becomes a hermit in the glen; then a story set in the early 1800s, where Charles Gibb comes to the big house in the glen to look at this manuscript about the life of Conach; and finally a modern story narrated by a woman called Maya, one of the oldest residents of the glen in the year 2020. It would appear that there are no connections among these stories other than the fact that they’re taking place in the one place, but the more you read, the more you realise there are threads linking them. Themes of refuge, of arriving and leaving and looking for a place of safety. That’s one of the biggest questions facing us today: people are on the move, forced to move because of war, famine, lack of jobs, political collapse, whatever it is. People are on the move because they want a better or safer life for themselves and their children. Who can deny that that is a legitimate and basic aspiration for any human being? There are a lot of double standards being applied at the moment. I was trying to explore the idea of how people are received when they come to a community from elsewhere. One of the things the world needs at the moment is more kindness and generosity. So the book is about that as well."