A History of Silence

A HISTORY OF SILENCE

Praise for
Mister Pip

‘As compelling as a fairytale—beautiful, shocking and profound.' HELEN GARNER

‘A brilliant narrative performance.'
Listener

‘
Mister Pip
is a rare, original and truly beautiful novel. It reminds us that every act of reading and telling is a transformation, and that stories, even painful ones, may carry possibilities of redemption. An unforgettable novel, moving and deeply compelling.' GAIL JONES

‘Poetic, heartbreaking, surprising…Storytelling, imagination, courage, beauty, memories and sudden violence are the main elements of this extraordinary book.' ISABEL ALLENDE

‘It reads like the effortless soar and dip of a grand piece of music, thrilling singular voices, the darker, moving chorus, the blend of the light and shade, the thread of grief urgent in every beat and the occasional faint, lingering note of hope.'
Age

‘A small masterpiece…Lloyd Jones is one of the best writers in New Zealand today. With the beautiful spare, lyrical quality that characterises his writing, Jones makes us think about the power and the magic of storytelling, the possibilities—and the dangers—of escaping to the world within.'
Dominion Post

‘A little Gauguin, a bit of
Lord Jim
, the novel's lyricism evokes great beauty and great pain.'
Kirkus Reviews

‘Rarely, though, can any novel have combined charm, horror and uplift in quite such superabundance.'
Independent

‘Lloyd Jones brings to life the transformative power of fiction… This is a beautiful book. It is tender, multi-layered and redemptive.'
Sunday Times

Praise for
Hand Me Down World

‘This is a writer who knows how to tell a story, deftly, surprisingly, magnificently.'
Weekend Herald NZ

‘A masterful, prismatic piece of storytelling.'
Independent

‘An extraordinary novel…Jones is a daring writer who can be relied on to ignore expectation, and is becoming one of the most interesting, honest and thought-provoking novelists working today.'
Guardian

‘Delicate and beguiling. It spirits the reader into a world that is both fascinating and perplexing. Its charms are hard to resist; its questions are hard to avoid… a book of great mind and heart.'
Age

‘Jones's touch is deft yet bold…a novel so fine, demanding and morally acute.'
Sydney Morning Herald

‘Jones slowly reveals the secrets of Ines's story and its emotional momentum sweeps us up and makes us fellow travellers.'
Weekend Australian

‘A fine and moving story with enormous compassion, emotional depth and tender insight into humanity… a superbly written meditation on how the disenfranchised accept the world as it is handed to them, on the weakness of men, on the deeply moving kindness of strangers, and on the power of maternal love. It is a beautiful book.'
Sunday Mail

‘We surely have sufficient evidence to trumpet Lloyd Jones as one of the most significant novelists writing today.'
Sunday Times

‘As complex and as beautifully crafted as a fine patchwork quilt.'
South Taranaki Star

‘Haunting to the very final line.'
Daily Telegraph

Lloyd Jones was born in New Zealand in 1955. His best-known works include
Mister Pip
, winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize,
The Book of Fame
, winner of numerous literary awards,
Here at the End of the World
We Learn to Dance
,
Biografi
,
Choo Woo
,
Paint Your Wife
,
The Man in
the Shed
, and
Hand Me Down World
. He lives in Wellington.

LLOYD

JONES

A HISTORY OF

SILENCE

A MEMOIR

Front cover: the author's mother, Joyce, and her father, O.T. Evans. All family photos courtesy of the author.

Reading notes available at
textpublishing.com.au/resources

textpublishing.com.au

The Text Publishing Company
Swann House
22 William Street
Melbourne Victoria 3000
Australia

Copyright © Lloyd Jones 2013

The moral right of Lloyd Jones to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

First published in Australia in 2013 by The Text Publishing Company.

Cover design by WH Chong
Page design by Imogen Stubbs
Typeset by J & M Typesetting

Extract from
Krapp's Last Tape
© the Estate of Samuel Beckett reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd and Grove/Atlantic Inc.
Extract from
In Search of Ancient New Zealand
by Hamish Campbell and Gerard Hutching reprinted by permission of Penguin Group (NZ).

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry
Author:      Jones, Lloyd, 1955- author.
Title:          A history of silence : a memoir / by Lloyd Jones.
ISBN:         9781922147332 (paperback)
eISBN:       9781922148360 (ebook)
Subjects:    Jones, Lloyd, 1955—Family.
                    Family secrets.
                     Dewey Number: 920.720993

TO THE
MEMORY OF
JOYCE LILLIAN JONES
AND
EDWARD LLEWELLYN JONES

…spiritually a year of profound gloom and
indulgence until that memorable night…
when suddenly I saw the whole vision at last.

Samuel Beckett,
Krapp's Last Tape

Faults may appear to be haphazard, but they
are never random. There is always a hidden
control or reason for their presence…

Hamish Campbell & Gerard Hutching,
In Search of Ancient New Zealand

I'm looking for the face I had
Before the world was made.

William Butler Yeats,
‘Before the World Was Made'

ONE

NIGHT-TIME. THE CITY is strung out like sea bloom. No lapping sounds. Just a volume of event that rocks inside me.

Put it down to the hour—that last hour when the dark feels painted on and the shapes of the city float in an underwater dream.

I like to sit by the window and watch the lights come on, as bits of life surface here and there. The shadow of someone appears at a window and then the lights switch off again as though a mistake has been made. The fan extractor perched on the roof of the Irish pub grinds away. In the joinery next door, old window frames and doors sit in a bath of acid. They take a while to strip back to their original grain. In another hour Gib will turn up to open his cafe for a clientele that includes me, and my neighbour, a software designer and chess fanatic, and others less fortunate, who, Gib tells me, are loaded up on methadone, Ritalin, or lithium, or just plain crazy. Soon car doors will bang shut and motors will be left running as harried young parents march their kids into the creche next to the cafe. In certain winds, tiny voices float up to the windows as though blown through a whistle—high-pitched, squealing, so happy to be alive. Down on the corner, outside the music store, the tired old trickster, who has pulled her last van driver in for the night, sits on a bench waving the early traffic through on its way to the airport. I often think about taking her down a cup of tea, like a water-boy running onto the field during a break in play. Immediately below my window, four floors down, the beeping rubbish trucks reverse into the night dreams of those still asleep. Their sleep is delicately poised. A container holding several thousand beer bottles will soon be upended into the back of the rubbish truck, and the crescendo of falling glass will tear through the remaining layers of the night. This is how the neighbourhood emerges each day—modestly, a bit scruffily, in a mix of grace and buffoonery.

I am writing these notes from the top floor of an old shoe factory in inner city Wellington. As a child I wore shoes manufactured in this same building. Then, it would have been unthinkable that one day a suburban kid like me would end up living in a factory, let alone in the city. I would have thought that some terrible event must have befallen me. But if someone had offered me a bird's nest I would have leapt at it. And yet here within shared walls come the muffled sounds of movement, of pipes creaking and groaning into life.

Very little of the shoe factory remains. The old shoe racks are filled with my books, many about famous expeditions. Man and dog and a few frozen ponies. The lone sailor holding his course beneath a sky of terror. There are books that contain shadows. The ones I turn to more often are those that celebrate the unsaid. I like declarative sentences to come with a lot of white space around them. So, naturally, there is Chinese poetry with its inky landscapes. Rice paddies. Bamboo. There are also some sports books, but not as many as I have read. A slender book advises on concreting, and another offers back relief through a series of diagrams.

One or two of these books were owned by my mother, including a paperback in which the Canadian Air Force shares its exercise and fitness regime. It remains unconsulted but kept for sentimental reasons like the jar of jam in the corner of the pantry that I took from her house after she died. There's Evelyn Waugh's
Scoop
, which I retain on the strength of the inscription on inside fly leaf—to Dad from my mother,
For Lew with love
Joyce
. While they were alive I never heard love expressed so openly between them. Their bedroom was at the front of the house. The door was almost always closed, which reinforced the mystery of their lives. There were glimpses whenever the door was ajar of two beds parked as in a motel room. An atmosphere so unlived in, so spare, that the rest of the house felt over-furnished.