A sound strategy
A ‘GUERRILLA CAMPAIGN’ HELPS SPARK INTEREST IN PLAYWRIGHT’S NEW NOVEL
Can You Hear The Hum? Those were the words, in large black letters, that began mysteriously popping up on London lampposts earlier this year. The posters contained a telephone number for those wanting further information, and that would lead to a recorded voice that talked callers through potential symptoms they might be experiencing from a strange humming sound in their ears before promising to supply them with an “information pack” if they provided details.
It was all part of a unique marketing strategy in behalf of award-winning Canadian writer Jordan Tannahill’s new novel, The Listeners, an eerie story about a middle-aged school teacher whose life spins out of control when she starts hearing a mysterious, untraceable hum in the night.
The campaign was the brainchild of Tannahill’s British publisher, and a lot of callers ended up getting a free book. “It was sort of a guerrilla campaign,” Tannahill says approvingly. And because the poster’s message also showed up on Twitter and Instagram, it started going viral. “There were responses from all over the world,” he marvels. And the responders ranged from diehard conspiracy theorists to people who claimed to be genuinely hearing a hum themselves.
“There are still mysteries about the world we live in,” Tannahill says in an interview from Berlin, where he was visiting. Such is the case with what he calls The Hum, a strange phenomenon that has long fascinated him. Tannahill, a non-hearer himself, finds it impossible to discount the evidence of thousands of people around the world who claim to have heard it and often been tormented by it. (there have estimates that it could afflict as much as two per cent of the world’s population).
But how to explain it? History tells Tannahill that sounds outside our normal experience can’t simply be dismissed as some kind of strange contemporary affliction. He knows about Joan of Arc and her voices.
“I keep remembering those early stories about people who hear voices — and for many of them it was the voice of God or some other kind of divine intervention. I think that’s what really drew me to the story of The Hum — these stories of people who are ostracized from family and neighbours, who feel that they alone have this secret burden or possibly this secret gift that binds them to each other.”
That sums up Claire, the beleaguered narrator of The Listeners, a novel arriving in Canada this month after its dramatic launching in the United Kingdom. Her nightmare begins one night when she’s lying in bed with her husband and hears this low humming sound. He hears nothing and neither does their daughter Ashley, but the persistent hum in Claire’s ears begins taking a fearsome toll that includes migraines, nose bleeds and insomnia, alienates her from friends and family and jeopardizes her teaching job.
She discovers that one of her student also hears The Hum, and that leads to involvement with a disparate group of neighbours who are also privately coping with this profoundly isolating experience.
What begins as a sort of support group evolves into something more troubling. Are the “listeners” in some way among the chosen, members of a select cult, possessors of a unique truth? Are the foundations here for a religious group, one capable of collectively experiencing some kind of “rapture” event? Or are the seeds being planted for the paranoia associated with conspiracy theorists?
There are moments when The Listeners enters the realm of the metaphysical. But Tannahill’s assured sense of the theatrical also ensures moments of high drama, as with a nerve-racking moment when armed police arrive at a group gathering prepared to break down the door.
He admits to more than one “slippery line” in the novel. For example, what happens “when people move from it being a sort of a shared idea into a cult which then becomes a faith.” But when Tannahill, an internationally acclaimed Ottawa-born playwright now living in London, discusses the genesis for this, his second novel, he always returns to the basics — to The Hum itself.
He first became aware of it more than a decade ago when reports surfaced about a mysterious hum in Windsor, Ont. The source of that mystery was eventually traced to a steel mill across the river in Detroit, but Tannahill’s interest had been kindled and he began to research the incidence of Hum reports in greater depth. He was particularly affected by one notorious situation where The Hum had allegedly caused several suicides within a community. “I felt this empathy for people who could be driven to such lengths,” he says.
Tannahill moved to England five years ago to work on his highly praised virtual reality piece, Draw Me Close, which was being mounted by Britain’s National Theatre in partnership with Canada’s National Film Board. His continuing obsession with The Hum had crossed the ocean with him and it was at this point, with the encouragement of friends and colleagues, that he began working on a play.
But despite being a twotime Governor General’s Award winner for drama, the multi-talented Tannahill realized he was steering the wrong course when he ended up with a sprawling fourhour epic.
“It was sort of unstageworthy and unwieldy,” he says with an embarrassed laugh. Nevertheless, the play’s workshop sessions were beneficial, bringing him closer to the beating heart of the piece he wanted to write. He now knew that the character of Claire was all-important and that it was her interior landscape he needed to enter. She belonged in a novel.
Tannahill acknowledges that Claire can be an unreliable narrator, but hopes that this will further intrigue readers.
“I tried to make her an empathetic and relatable character, but, ultimately, I think we should be left questioning Claire. She’s very bright, quite witty I think, and very much inspired by a close friend of mine. But there’s a lot of me in Claire as well, so she’s sort of a combination of that friend and my own voice.
“I know that she’s a middle-aged woman while I’m a gay man in my early 30s,” he says, “but I felt very comfortable with her. After spending four years with Claire I feel I know her very well.”