A History of Silence

"There might have been more to tell if more had been shared, if questions had been asked, if information had been offered and passed along at the moment it lit up in memory. But the family trait was silence. Great wreaths of it were wound around our lives and stuffed in the windows and hallway of our parents' house, and that is what was absorbed, that and, speaking for myself, a finely tuned ability to gauge the air in the room which at any moment might explode with the slam of a door"

A History of Silence is a memoir by New Zealand author, Lloyd Jones. Asked by a BBC radio producer to comment on the Christchurch earthquake of February, 2011, Jones travels there from his home in an old Auckland shoe factory to observe, perhaps to help? What he sees sets off a need inside him to discover the true history of his family, of which little has ever been revealed.

Jones turns his wonderful talent for descriptive prose to this memoir of his forebears: "I have never felt as lightly tethered to the earth as when the nor-wester is at full bombastic strength. Even my face feels rearranged – I can feel the nose bone sticking up and the wrong patch of skin where the forehead normally sits. Eyelids have to be prised open. The nose drips"

His research takes him to Pembroke Dock in search of a paternal grandfather allegedly "lost at sea", but his narrative also tends to go off on loosely-related tangents, like relating a visit to Russia to meet his wife's ancestors. In his search, he regularly draws parallels with both the earthquake and, later, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. Thus it takes a while to reach the most interesting part: the court transcript of his maternal grandmother's divorce.

"Of course the earthquake struck when and where it did, and to the naked eye of course the pattern of bad luck would seem random, unless of course you knew about the old city map indicating ancient subterranean waterways, and of course I would find myself born into a world of silence because that is precisely what the shamed bestows upon the progeny – a wilful forgetting"