The Silence
It is 1997, and in a basement flat in Hackney Isla Green is awakened by a call in the middle of the night: her father, phoning from Sydney.
30 years ago, in the suffocating heat of summer 1967, the Greens’ next-door neighbour Mandy disappeared. At the time, it was thought she had gone to start a new life; but now Mandy’s family is trying to reconnect, and there is no trace of her. Isla’s father Joe was allegedly the last person to see her alive, and now he’s under suspicion of murder.
Reluctantly, Isla goes back to Australia for the first time in a decade. The return to Sydney will plunge her deep into the past, to a quiet street by the sea where two couples live side by side. Isla’s parents, Louisa and Joe, have recently emigrated from England — a move that has left Louisa miserably homesick while Joe embraces this new life. Next door, Steve and Mandy are equally troubled. Mandy doesn’t want a baby, even though Steve — a cop trying to hold it together under the pressures of the job — is desperate to become a father.
The more Isla asks about the past, the more she learns: about both young couples and the secrets each marriage bore. Could her father be capable of doing something terrible? How much does her mother know? And is there another secret in this community, one which goes deeper into Australia’s colonial past, which has held them in a conspiracy of silence?
I really enjoyed this book, except for one thing and that was the constant back and forwards in time. One day, soon, this will go out of fashion. It was overdone and I had to keep checking when and where I was.
It is a difficult book to review without giving anything away. Like most Brits my knowledge of the persecution of Aborigines is sparse and it is well worth reading the authors notes at the end. The author notes that the Australian government has apologised but not the British. A difficult subject these apologies, how far do you go back to apologising for your ancestors behaviour? I am not condoning any of this, far from it, but you have to learn by your mistakes and not repeat them, but no amount of apologies or money will make amends for what happened. And while children from poor Aborigine families were being taken away and put into institutions, they were also taking children from the UK to Australia.
The book is also about complex family dynamics, a newly immigrated family starting out on their new life but Louisa finding it difficult to fit in. It was very much a man's world and Joe had a good job, but Louisa relied on her neighbour Mandy to help her through things. Mandy had her own problems with her relationship with her husband, he in turn was struggling with his job as a Policeman tasked with removing children.
Violence and alcoholism play a large part in the families live, especially with Joe and Isla his daughter.
The ending was a little bit too rushed, everything sown up a little too quickly.
Thank you to NetGalley and The Publisher for my ARC in return for an honest review.