In the beginning, there was silence. “The silence was in me. And the silence was me. It lasted eighty days”. So writes Evie Steppman, crouched over her luminescent computer in the perpetual twilight of her attic at the top of a house in Gullane, Scotland. Evie, in her fifties now, alone — both mother and father gone — is fast losing the one exceptional capacity she possesses, one that has dominated her life: her fantastically keen sense of hearing. So keen that even as she floated in her mother's womb, after the initial eighty days of silence, she heard, “....the vicious spitting of feral cats, rug-beaters thwacking, traffic-bustle and crowds”. The year was 1946, the place, Nigeria, where Evie's father was a colonial officer. In the turgid heat of summer, Evie's mother suffered, awaiting her arrival, but Evie was loath to leave the echo chamber of her mother's womb where she was safe from the dangers of the outside, and where she was “free to tumble and dream.” This stubbornness eventually caused her mother's death and Evie was evicted into a world marked by the absence of a mother, the presence of a distracted, often indifferent father, a world she perceived almost entirely through her immensely exaggerated powers of hearing.
Story of sounds
Now, decades later, against the thunderous beating of moth's wings against the skylight of the attic and the constant gnawing of invisible mice, Evie furiously attempts to retrieve and put down in words, the story of her life before she completely loses her hearing and with it all her accreted memories. For, sound is inextricably entwined with memory and all memory, especially for Evie, is sound. In this journey, she delves deep into her storehouse of sound and wherever there are gaps, she relies on the only family she has left, her maternal grandfather, Mr. Rafferty, who is committed to an institution in Edinburgh, a result of the peculiar delusions he suffers from.
This story, told largely by unreliable narrators, is one of overwhelming complexity and detail. Evie is reminiscent of other characters in fiction who are burdened with heightened senses: Saleem Sinai in Midnight's Children and more recently, Kitty in Clare Morrall's Astonishing Splashes of Colour , where Kitty suffers from synaesthesia, a condition where feelings are felt in colour. And like these abnormally sensitive characters before her, Evie too, inevitably, spins a story that entrances and seduces, yet, at the same time, scatters seeds of doubt, for, her story is only as strong — thus, just as frail — as memories of sounds can be.
Luke Williams has blended the real and the fantastic skilfully in this daring new novel. Against the panoramic background of Nigeria just before the British relinquished power, a country full of exuberant African colours and sounds, but also a country thrumming with the aspirations of an enslaved people on the verge of freedom, he paints in other exotic elements: the acclaimed geographer, El-Edrisi, Vizier of King Norman of Sicily, a man obsessed with his own history and memories; a mappa mundi of the world, revealing it in all its bizarreness and later in the story, a tour of America undertaken by a flamboyant rock star who with his “lightning-slash cheekbones, refrigerated lips, hair cut and dyed burned orange” calls to mind David Bowie.
Powerful narrative
Yet, all this noise and tumult, all these grand happenings do not dominate — against all this Evie's story beats loud and clear. This is clearly her story, all the minutiae of her life — the cries of hawkers in the markets of Lagos, the sounds she hears elephants make, the hollow sound of rain falling into puddles, lakes and seas; and all the people she loses and gains only to lose again — come together to create a powerful, resonant narrative that reels in the reader who follows Evie breathlessly on her journey, in her quest of, ultimately, silence. Silence, after all the din and commotion of her life, something Evie seeks, “knowing there is no such thing”. An absence of noise that she remembers from that fragile beginning in her echo chamber. This novel, a striking debut, is replete with the sounds and colours and smells of life, but all the time reminds the reader of the silence that flows beneath.
The Echo Chamber,Luke Williams, Hamish Hamilton, p.372, Rs. 499.
