After SilenceJonathan Carroll
Macdonald hardback, 240 pages, £14.99
Published April 1992
ISBN 0356203425
Review by Steven Blake (1992)
Jonathan Carroll’s characters ride the roller-coaster of human desires and emotions. If the brilliant, self-serving architect Harry Radcliffe, in Carroll’s last novel, Outside the Dog Museum, caught a glimpse of optimism at the end of his quest then it was a muted, double-edged glimpse. Even so, it left him better equipped to face life than most of Carroll’s characters are when he’s finished with them.
Successful thirtysomething LA cartoonist Max Fischer opens his narration with the news that he is holding a loaded gun to his son’s head while the boy laughs. When, cautious after prior relationships, he met left-field restaurant manager Lily Aaron and her clever nine-year-old son Lincoln, he thought he had discovered his soulmate and a ready-made family. He embarks on a delirious, offbeat romance. But a freak accident awakens in him suspicions of trouble in paradise, and as he digs deeper into Lily’s past he uncovers a dreadful secret that in turn will echo through the choices with which he is now faced.
When Outside the Dog Museum appeared in 1991, there were stirrings even amongst his disciples (who include heavyweights like Ramsey Campbell and Thomas Harris) that, despite the book’s undoubted excellence, Carroll’s blend of imaginative philosophical meditation was becoming almost – paradoxically – clichéd.
Whether he listened to his critics or not,
After Silence is a departure from the author’s well tested
formula. The beautifully written story is told with Carroll’s usual
flair, but Vienna has gone, and gone also is a creative central figure’s quest
for an unimaginable truth. In their place Carroll makes a partial
return to the territory explored in his 1990 novella
Black Cocktail, that of an individual as a component of a multiple
personality. Here this is developed it to more enigmatic and reflective levels
through richly detailed characterisation and sly asides – ‛I don’t
like living in a world where ‛correct’ is so rare that it becomes
‛kind’ ’, says Lily. And there are two entirely logical but totally
unexpected sucker punches as
After Silence draws to a close that more than deliver what Carroll himself terms the ‛Oh!’ factor in his work. Carroll is a fine writer, who well knows how to capture the fragility of emotional life and the magic of children. Unfortunately there are problems. There’s a not entirely convincing jolt, at one point. The plot goes awry – for a writer so good at recording emotion Carroll can be surprisingly untidy with his characters – one character’s background simply doesn’t work. And then there are the names: interesting people, with nice careers, tend to have interesting names and Carroll’s flair for detail lavished upon them. Dull, working class clods don’t. The nice, successful, middle class Carroll doesn’t seem to have much time for the lower orders.
After Silence only just escapes collapse due to these problems. Just. This book is ultimately closer to Carroll’s melancholy second novel Voice of Our Shadow than it is to any of his others, with its study of a man who finds reality irrevocably shifting beneath his feet through his reactions to the magic that drifts almost imperceptibly into his life. But unlike in Voice of Our Shadow, and indeed unlike in much of his work, Carroll subtly undercuts the elements of epiphany in Fischer’s life with an element of free will. This gives the final revelations the same severe, gut-wrenching quality he achieved in his masterpiece, Sleeping in Flame.
That After Silence stands comparison with Sleeping in Flame is testament to Carroll’s calibre as not simply a genre writer, but as one of the most distinctive and truly remarkable writers of his generation. While not as good as Sleeping in Flame, After Silence remains an exceptional novel.