Unspoken: The Things We Cannot Say, by Harriet Shawcross

ARABELLA BYRNE Unspoken: The Things We Cannot Say By Harriet Shawcross Canongate £14.99

Silence is golden. Except for Harriet Shawcross, it’s not golden at all, Or rather it can be, but only on her terms: on a meditation retreat in the Highlands or in the British Library.

In her debut work – I hesitate to call it memoir or literary criticism – Shawcross takes us on a journey through her own silence, taking in the 20thcentury poet George Oppen, selective mutism, the Samaritans, earthquake survivors in Nepal and The Vagina

Monologues, via a brief detour into trench warfare, before crescendoing with her own coming-out story.

Confused? You might well be. The premise of the book is appealing enough: as an awkward teenager, Shawcross stopped talking at school when her father became redundant.

If this sounds like your average shy, introspective teenager, she’s quick to point out that it’s not. Shawcross, you see, had selective mutism. Or she thought she did, but then she went to a few conferences and talked to a therapist with an epileptic dog and realised that she didn’t after all. ‘I think I was simply quietened by the shame of my father’s redundancy.’ Ahhh.

Using memoir as a structural skeleton for the book, she looks at instances where silence lurks in the interstices of experience, her own and others. Some of this is very interesting, even if it doesn’t have much to do with silence: Oppen’s midlife silent hiatus is not nearly as gripping as his own testimony on his abusive childhood and his years as a fugitive in Mexico from the Mccarthy regime.

Likewise, when she’s describing her own experience as a Samaritan, I found myself more interested in the discussion on the now anachronistic ‘Brendas’ – those unfortunate Samaritans who had to listen to men masturbating on the other end of the telephone, to honour one of Chad Varah’s original purposes for his organisation as sex therapy – than how and why the Samaritans stayed silent.

Time and again, by venturing into the ‘things we cannot say’, Shawcross ends up saying too much altogether, the result being rather confusing. Which isn’t to argue that the material doesn’t merit inclusion; simply that it feels hard to link the disparate parts.

I felt as if Shawcross’s own grasp on the material had wandered off slightly when she skates over trench warfare and silence with the most cursory of sentences: ‘The First World War eventually led to the opening of several psychiatric hospitals – and in some sense paved the way for the enduring idea, enshrined by the Samaritans, that it’s “good to talk”.’ I’m not sure Freud would have been happy to have his theories of repression reduced to a BT slogan, but Shawcross doesn’t linger.

And yet, despite my frustrations with the narrative, I was provoked into thinking more about silence. Is silence the opposite of speech or the very condition of its possibility? Should we start to think beyond Freud and buried repression and instead think more broadly about silence as a choice? As Shawcross notes after meeting a nun in a silent religious order, ‘The idea that silence could both unhinge your stable sense of self, and allow a closer communion with the world, is compelling.’

Although she flirts with the idea of silence as a vector of remembrance

and healing, Shawcross is far more drawn to the idea that the silent are the dispossessed or the marginalised: ‘Speaking about your experiences can help bring order to chaos, as it did for the meat-seller’s daughter in Nepal, when the world had literally fallen apart. Despite the inevitable distortion of telling, there is still a value in trying to explain what has happened.’

The narrative ends with Shawcross’s marriage to her girlfriend at a register office in Peckham, an event she casts as the ‘final and defiant emergence from the uncertainty of silence’, using an Oppen poem for her vows.

If any of this sounds too noisy for your sensibilities, cover your ears.