The Quality of Silence
By Rosamund Lupton; Crown; 2016; 304 pages; $26
Imagine "Ice Road Truckers" crossed with "Gasland," the reality TV show where men drive 18-wheelers on frozen highways and the documentary film about fracking, respectively. This will give you an idea about "The Quality of Silence," a mystery-thriller set in Alaska, by the British author Rosamund Lupton.
Alaska as a setting for thrillers and adventure stories seems irresistible to writers from every corner of the Earth, and the usual tropes will be found here -- northern Alaska as a vast wilderness, bitterly cold and completely dark in winter, empty but for a few villages and rough-and-tumble oil field workers, attractive wildlife and some nefarious goings-on.
Enter the characters who will complete it.
A British woman, Yasmin, and her deaf 10-year-old daughter arrive in Alaska in midwinter in the midst of a marital crisis. The husband and father, Matt, a wildlife photographer, is in the Arctic, making a film about wildlife in winter, and Yasmin suspects another woman. She and her daughter, Ruby, are met at the Fairbanks airport by a policeman who tells them there's been a terrible accident, and that Matt is dead.
Yasmin, a stubborn (and foolhardy, sometimes dangerous to others) woman, does not believe the evidence and sets off up the Dalton Highway to rescue her husband. Soon she's driving a big rig through storms and frigid temperatures, chased by a mysterious somebody and being threatened by photos of dead animals. For readers, it's a long, long drive up that highway while she relives the early days of her marriage, contemplates her relationship with both husband and daughter, and struggles to keep Ruby from freezing to death.
There will be shooting
Ruby, the deaf daughter, is the narrator and most engaging character here. She relies on her laptop and computer technology, as well as signing, to communicate with her parents and the rest of the world. (Her tweets are absolutely charming.) Part of the conflict here is that her mother, consumed with wanting Ruby to "use her voice," fails to hear what she's already saying. The world of the deaf (or at least this one deaf child) seems well evoked here.
"My bracelet vibrates, which means there's a loud noise. It's like a James Bond gadget for deaf people so I know if someone's shooting at me (the man in the special shop said that and I thought it was pretty funny). It's meant to let you know if a car's coming, in case you forget to look both ways."
Be assured, there will be shooting before the story's over.
Modern technology in general is well-incorporated throughout as a significant plot device. Ruby uses voice recognition and its reverse (typing that becomes voiced) technologies, emails and tweets are sent and received from distant parts, photos are uploaded and downloaded, satellites are sought and found, blogs are posted, Google Earth is consulted and the cold interferes with everything. This is a nice twist to the thriller genre, which so often relies on an absence or breakdown of communication to advance plots.
The parents here are both scientists -- one an astrophysicist and the other a zoologist, and their knowledge of the sky and wildlife, much of it filtered through Ruby's learning, add to character development and a sense of the real world.
Author's 3rd novel
Since it seems to be deeply dark throughout this multiday adventure, there's a lot of night sky to examine. Once, mother and daughter view paraselanae, or moon dogs, and Yasmin explains about the moonlight bouncing against ice crystals in the high clouds. Another time it's the aurora borealis. Again, after a storm, the sky is full of stars, described by Ruby as "diamonds and laser-bright dots and thousands of bits of sunlight caught and held up in the sky. Like glitter on velvet and light breaking on glass and they are magic and they are real!"
And Ruby has learned from her father about musk oxen, ravens and river otters, which she describes accurately in her blog posts.
Inupiat people are also portrayed, with reasonable respect. Matt had been living in a small village with the fictional name Anaktue, located somewhere on the North Slope near fictional fracking wells. Ruby tells us, "Inupiat people aren't stuck in the past like some people think. They hunt caribou and make aputiat (the word used here for an igloo or temporary snow house), but they have snowmobiles and laptops, too; it's not an either/or thing."
This is a third novel for Lupton, whose first ("Sister," about a woman's search for her missing sister) was a best-seller in both England and the United States. From the back-of-the-book information, she appears to have done a fair amount of research for "The Quality of Silence," including following the Dalton Highway on Google Earth and visiting Alaska. If her plot sometimes stretches past believability -- well, that will be part of the surprise in reading this mystery-thriller.
Nancy Lord is a Homer-based writer and former Alaska writer laureate. Her books include "Fishcamp," "Beluga Days" and "Early Warming."