from the editor's desk
Review of ‘The Silent Listener’ by Lyn Yeowart
Yeowart, Lyn. The Silent Listener. Penguin Random House, 2021. RRP: $32.99, 480pp, ISBN: 9781760895730.
Jen Bowden
It takes a brave soul to write from personal trauma, and based on the contents of The Silent Listener, Lyn Yeowart is one of the bravest people I know.
Her debut novel is a suspenseful, original and engaging story that has drawn comparisons to Delia Owens’s Where the Crawdads Sing and Jane Harper’s The Dry. While both comparisons are warranted, The Silent Listener brings so much more to the table with its approach towards addressing the conflict between public and private spaces when it comes to domestic and family violence.
At the heart of this book is Joy, an eleven-year-old girl living through the cold wet of rural Victoria in 1960. Around her is her family—her sister Ruth, her brother Mark, mother Gwen and father George—and we see them through her eyes as she navigates childhood and adolescence in this volatile household. Ravelled in her narrative is the story of a missing young girl, Wendy Boscome, and George’s involvement in her disappearance.
George is a man with many faces; in the community he is a pillar of society, a church elder and a local musician. At home he is the tyrant that abuses his children and leaves them physically and emotionally scarred to the point that when Joy returns as he is on his deathbed, she is still afraid of him.
Joy is a vibrant character, full of life and imagination and childlike wonder. But her spirit is broken repeatedly by her father’s reign of terror. She has synaesthesia, a neurological gift which, at the most basic level, means she sees images associated with words.
When she managed to concentrate properly, she could read reasonably well, but if there was a word with a particularly vibrant or horrific image, like the bloodied axe that had burst into her head when she heard the word camisado, she couldn’t see anything but the image and could do nothing but sit, mute like an imbecile, while the image overpowered her brain. (40)
This condition is the source of much delight for Joy in the way it pulls her away from her grim reality, and it becomes a means through which she is can define herself. It allows her an escape, a silent creativity that won’t get her into trouble and shows her as being special. It’s something bright in the dark, dangerous world in which she exists.
The most devastating thing about reading The Silent Listener is seeing Joy in among the family of her school friend, Felicity. Her interactions with them, especially when she goes to their house for dinner, give us a glimpse into the kind of life she could have had if her father was as nurturing and warm as Mr and Mrs Felicity (as Joy calls them).
For the next two hours, Joy and Felicity sat in Felicity’s bedroom, talking and laughing. They could be as loud as they wanted to be […] When Felicity left the room, saying, ‘I’ll be back in a sec,’ Joy pondered this strange and wonderful life. (173)
That Joy views freedom, laughter and play as ‘strange and wonderful’ just goes to show how little she is allowed to live in her own home. Yeowart has been frank about how much of the book is based on her own personal experience with domestic abuse at the hands of her father, but the testament to her writing is her ability to step outside of herself and use her experience as inspiration for creating the fully rounded character of Joy, rather than a caricature of a typical ‘victim’.
One of the things The Silent Listener does particularly well is explore emotional abuse as an act of violence that is every bit as devastating as physical abuse.
‘Sometimes,’ she continued, looking him straight in the eye, ‘he’d keep us waiting for over an hour. Of course, we weren’t allowed to do anything while we waited—that was part of the punishment, the long terrible wait […]’ (310)
For Joy, fear and pain do not always come from the physical violence that her father inflicted on her, but from the psychological torture that she endured waiting for that act to occur. Yeowart deals with this deftly, focusing on the gradual but destructive build-up of emotional abuse and fear that destroys Joy’s sense of safety and self bit by bit. If Christ is the silent listener in Joy’s house—as the hanging on the wall says—then we, the reader, are the silent observer of her pain and torture.
The Silent Listener is much more than an expertly crafted exploration of the effects of violence and abuse on children and families. It’s a page-turning, gripping crime thriller that will have you glued to it until you’ve reached the end. If you want mystery, intrigue and intelligent writing, this is the book you’re looking for.
Jen is a writer and journalist based in Perth. She lived and worked in Edinburgh, Scotland for ten years and has written for a number of UK newspapers and magazines including The List, The Guardian and The Scotsman. She previously worked for Scoop Events and in the marketing team at Fremantle Press, and is now a freelance writer and editor.
