A History of Silence

Starred review from May 1, 2014

New Zealand-born Jones is best known for his novel Mister Pip (short-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2007, made into a film starring Hugh Laurie in 2012). The author's first memoir is a meditation on the loneliness and willful forgetting of a family's history, inspired by the February 2011 earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand. The city was built on swamplands, but its origins had long been forgotten and the foundations considered solid. But when the earth shook, the soil turned to water. Jones was inspired to examine his own underpinnings and found much of his family mythology was oversimplified or patently false. Taking what facts he could find, Jones reconstructs a story of his ancestry. The resulting account is complex, written in spare, evocative prose, combining time lines and verb tenses and reading more as poetry than as linear narrative. The sense of the world's largeness to a child is captured effectively, as are Jones's adult observations. VERDICT Those who enjoy quality literature should savor this deeply moving and beautifully communicated memoir. Readers who prefer narratives in neat packages with definitive answers and resolutions will be less stirred.--Audrey Snowden, Orrington P.L., ME

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 15, 2014
Jones' history of silence is both in his bones and in the land where he grew up and now lives, New Zealand, described as it is today and as it was depicted in paintings by such artists as William Swainson, full of trees, plant life, and huts, replaced over time by long green fields or transplants: English flowers shiver in the newly cleared space: forget-me-nots. Jones' grandmother, Maud, had years ago apparently given his own mother away and later denied she ever had a daughter, and Jonesauthor of the award-winning Mister Pip (2007), among otherslimns his mother's tragedy of not being able to forget; his grandfather's reputed death at sea; and the tangled truths about his past. This is a poetic and deeply felt musing about what can be discovered, or what can simply be remembered, and the effect this has on one's purview. Set against the literal and figurative backdrop of the 2011 earthquake that devastated Christchurch and that shook his own foundation, Jones' memoir is a melancholy and luscious exploration of the amnesia that allows us to move forward in life.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)