If nothing else, Barnaby Martin’s book The Quiet might win a prize for the weirdest literary post-apocalypse. And that’s saying something in a genre that has had killer viruses, malevolent mushrooms, zombies, aliens and robots. But even with its wacky premise, The Quiet falls quickly into the same tropes as many other books in this genre and does very little to make them new or interesting.
The Soundfield is some unexplained form of atmospheric anomaly that began about ten years before the book opens. It significantly increased both global temperatures and UV levels, rendering some parts of the world uninhabitable. And it has prevented people in other areas going out during daytime to the point where most people have “shifted” to a nighttime existence. The Soundfield also creates low level noise – a music in the air which seems like it may be some form of communication. Just a warning up front: for those looking for any explanation – where the Soundfield came from, why it does what it does, or how – Martin is not going to provide one.
The action is set in Britain (while the country is never specifically named this is clearly British post-apocalyptic fiction). The country is under some form of authoritarian rule and those authorities are taking children for something called the “Atavism Project”. Why this is only comes clear later in the book. One of those children is Isaac, who, when the book opens is being taken from his mother Dr Hannah Newnham, herself an expert on the Soundfield.
The narrative focusses on Hannah and Isaac. Following the opening Martin goes back a few days to describe their lives – Hannah is hiding the fact that six-year-old Isaac does not speak but can sing, she has a fraught relationship with her dying mother, she works as a lecturer on the subject of the Soundfield, and the pair live a hand to mouth nighttime existence in a towerblock. Once the narrative catches back up to the opening scene, it then moves forward with a little more pace and threat.
The Quiet is full of post-apocalyptic tropes, particularly those in books of this type coming out of the UK (for example Ali Smith’s Gliff, This Fragile Earth by Susannah Wise, The End We Start From by Megan Hunter). This includes an authoritarian regime, food shortages, tower blocks, special clothing for going outside, a resistance movement (who live in an abandoned shopping centre, naturally). But despite the intense daytime heat and dangerous UV, there also seems to be a fairly unspoiled “countryside” in which animals (apparently immune to the high UV levels and heat?) roam around. Never mind the unanswered question as to where the food is coming from in a world where it is appears to be too hot and blasted by UV to grow crops. This is just lazy worldbuilding – and the Soundfield itself increasingly feels like an idea that is never allowed to make sense.
What is worse, or at least more unforgiveable, is that nothing actually resolves by the end of the book. The characters never discover where the Soundfield comes from or how it works or how to communicate with it. Isaac is somehow a key to all of it in a way that is never made clear (it has something to do with “atavism”). But in the end Isaac is seemingly ignored by the authorities. The final couple of twists, in particular, make little sense except for Martin trying to tie some disparate threads together.
Martin, a composer who has turned to writing, has a few interesting ideas about music and language which he tests out in The Quiet. But they are buried in a clichéd, nonsensical post-apocalyptic scenario.
The Quiet by Barnaby Martin
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