Martin Booth: Islands of Silence

Reviewed by MATT NIPPERT

For a book hanging on the beaches of Gallipoli, and exploring the accompanying shell-shock, there's an awful lot of silence. Our narrator, Alec, a wizened long-term patient at a mental facility, doesn't want to talk about the War. In fact, he doesn't talk at all.

His story is told from two chronological perspectives: the old Alec, who resists communication, fearing he would uncork terrible memories; and his younger self, an archaeologist who, thankfully, does speak.

Booth, best known for writing the Booker Prize-nominated Industry of Souls, likes placing his civilised characters in exotic settings, and Islands of Silence is no exception, being set on an island in the Scottish Highlands, Eilean Tosdach — the Island of Silence.

While war plays a part, platonic love takes centre stage. The young Alec excavates old castles in Scotland, during which he's transfixed by Meigaed, a wild but noble savage. Her silence is a result of a failed experiment, raised by deaf-mutes to see if she would naturally speak God's language, Hebrew. An old innkeeper says it was "thought she'd speak in the tongue of angels but everyone else thinks she speaks Satan's esperanto".

Instead, she's as shunned by locals as Alec is enchanted by her. While grounded in reality, an air of faerie surrounds the narrative, Celtic myth and village superstition hanging thick like Edinburgh fog. (Booth also penned in 2000 A Magic Life, the tale of poet-turned-devil-worshipper Aleister Crowley.)

Alec's wicked stepfather recounts a day of slaughter from his time as a colonel in the Boer War. "We learned an important military lesson that day, did we not? No more frontal attacks." A lesson, like most of history, quickly forgotten, as Alec learns when landing on the beaches of Gallipoli. When the Anzac baptism begins, Booth deftly summons all the horror and uncompromising violence in chapters that read like a literary Saving Private Ryan.

In a late and tragic turn of events, Booth died this year after being ill for 18 months with cancer. The Guardian, in its obituary, wrote that his "novels can be read to find out things, as well as to enjoy pace, prose and brisk intelligence". Islands of Silence possesses the same qualities. Recommended.

Dewi Lewis $34.95

* Matt Nippert is an Auckland journalist.