SILENCE IS A SENSE

A young Muslim woman watches her neighbors as she comes to terms with her own tragic history.

In AlAmmar’s second novel, a young woman has arrived in a quiet English town after months of difficult travel. Having fled her native Syria, the woman, who goes unnamed, journeyed through much of Europe before arriving, nearly catatonic. Now somewhat recovered, she sits and watches her neighbors through their windows: An old man eats alone; an abusive husband terrorizes his wife and children; a young man exercises obsessively. The contradiction at the heart of this lovely and intense novel is that the young woman, who doesn’t speak aloud—she allows her neighbors to think she’s deaf—narrates the novel. No one hears her voice but the reader, and it is a strong, formidable voice. In fact, she has so much to say that she begins writing a magazine column under the moniker “The Voiceless.” AlAmmar’s narrator may be a voyeur, but she is frankly critical of the voyeuristic tendencies of her editor, Josie, who asks that she write less often about politics and more about her own memories. “In [Josie’s] emails,” the narrator tells us, “she assures me that such articles are always topical, and it’s all people are wanting to read about given the state of the world, and could I tweak this and that before she publishes it.” It’s a smart, sharply constructed critique. So is the narrator of this fine book. But it isn’t a perfect novel: Not all the characters cohere into three-dimensional figures, and there are dream and memory sequences that can be difficult to follow—particularly an erotic one involving Edgar Allan Poe. Still, the narrator’s accounts of her own trauma, and the way that she is increasingly drawn into the life of her community, feel moving and fresh.

Beautifully wrought even if marred by minor discrepancies.