Jesse Ball: Silence Once Begun

But a novel that truly examines the perverse workings of a disturbed mind and dwells not on the crime or the criminal but on its psychological and indeed philosophical implications is rare. One that does so with the accomplishment of Silence Once Begun is remarkable indeed.  

The premise of the novel is simple and appalling. A man takes a bet and in losing is required to sign a confession to a series of capital crimes he did not commit. He is duly arrested and charged as beng responsible for a series of notorious disappearances that have terrified an entire region. Imprisoned and awaiting execution, he cannot protest his innocence having been condemned by his own signature. But nor can he give his interrogators the information they want about the crimes he did not commit.

So he says nothing and his silence becomes its own prison. The silence which is the language of the novel is pervasive and extraordinarily articulated. It creates a novel that demands deep engagement from the reader but is inescapably compelling. 

This is not a conventional mystery story offering us the comfort of gradually unfolding clues and the promise of resolution. It is a profoundly unsettling novel of eerie power, where the cruel question as to why someone has placed our hero in this situation is much deeper than the ostensible mystery of who committed the crimes.

This is a truly appalling novel in the best possible way, one that forces us to confront the darkest possibilities buried in the human psyche. The denouement resolves what we need to know but leaves us no less troubled.

It is a fine work that bears, indeed it begs, comparison with Franz Kafka’s The Trial in its chilling sense of entrapment and the cool exactitude with which the story unfolds. Ball has placed his story in Japan, drawing on the motifs of honour and authority that are strong in the culture, inviting more comparisons with Kafka’s Germany.  

But the deeper similarities are in the existential angst and the sense of helplessness that we feel in the maze which traps Oda Sotatsu as it traps his forbear K.

Unlike Kafka, Ball stands a little apart from his characters, writing in the voice of a detached but dogged journalist, piecing together the story from interviews and witness statements, moving in circles as he talks to Sotatsu’s parents and siblings, his jailers, trial observers and finally the mysterious associates who may help him understand how such a thing could have happened.

The novel has a curious momentum, sometimes difficult to maintain but mostly maintaining a fine thread of drama while resisting the conventions of storytelling. Unlike, say, JJ Abrahams much touted The Ship of Theseus, the story-telling does not become the story, the drive away from narrative is only ever a drive towards a bigger story.

True horror lies not in vampires or the tricks of the teller but in the knowledge of the evil within is. Ball is a master at exposing it.

Rating: 4 ½ out of 5 stars 

Silence Once Begun