Reviewed by Bill Sheehan

Graham Joyce rarely, if ever, lets the reader down. His best, most representative work–which encompasses short stories (Partial Eclipse), Young Adult fiction (TWOC, Do the Creepy Thing), and a steady stream of award-winning novels, including Requiem and The Facts of Life–is moving, absorbing, and instantly accessible. He is one of those writers who make traditional literary distinctions–horror vs. fantasy, genre vs. mainstream–seem not only trivial, but irrelevant as well. His latest, The Silent Land, is one of his most dreamlike, emotionally resonant creations to date. It should do much to extend both his reputation and his readership on both sides of the Atlantic.

The novel takes its title from Christina Rossetti’s sonnet, “Remember,” which begins:

Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land…

Rossetti’s poem is a meditation on the intertwined themes of love, death, and memory, themes that echo repeatedly throughout this book. The subject of death rears its head in the opening paragraph, when Zoe, one of Joyce’s two protagonists, gazes out at a pristine, snow-covered landscape and notes that “she could die in that place, and happily.”

Zoe, together with her husband Jake, is spending a much-anticipated holiday in the upscale ski resort of Saint-Bernard-en-Haut. Moments after that innocent reflection, the two of them–the only figures on the early morning ski slope–are caught up in a sudden avalanche and separated. Zoe finds herself upside down in a narrow vertical shaft–a “snow tomb”–with a diminishing supply of oxygen, At virtually the last possible moment, she is discovered and rescued by Jake, who has emerged from the avalanche relatively unscathed.

Shaken, they make their way back to their hotel and then to the neighboring village. Both places are utterly deserted and will remain that way. At first, they assume that a mass evacuation has occurred. But other events, events that defy rational explanation, keep taking place. Food left out for days remains fresh and untainted. Lighted candles burn without discernable melting. Time itself seems to pass at a decelerated rate. And each attempt to exit the village–by car or on foot–leads them back to their starting point. They are forced, eventually, to a conclusion that the reader has long since reached: that they died in the avalanche, and that the silent land they inhabit is a highly personalized version of the afterlife.

The bulk of what follows concerns their ongoing efforts to understand the nature of this new “existence.” For a time, it seems to be a form of paradise filled with great skiing, gourmet food, expensive wines, and an endlessly replenished erotic charge. But gradually things change, and the change affects the two of them in radically different ways. Sensory impressions–taste, touch, heat, cold–fade away and can be restored only by aggressively detailed acts of memory. Zoe experiences hallucinatory events–a crowded hotel lobby, a group of sinister figures in the snow, a ringing cell phone–that Jake can neither see nor hear. In time, her responses to this strange new world become colored by a constantly evolving sense of dread. Jake, on the other hand, becomes increasingly attuned to the mysterious frequencies of that world, seeing it as a miraculous realm “where the laws of physics and the laws of dreaming meet.”

Joyce recounts their diverging journeys through this eerie landscape with quiet virtuosity and a clean, uncluttered style that achieves enormous cumulative power. The revelations that eventually emerge seem both astonishing and inevitable, and rest on a foundation of seemingly random clues and images scattered, with great ingenuity, throughout the narrative. The result is a suspenseful, otherworldly adventure and a metaphysical love story as real and affecting as anything you’re likely to encounter in contemporary fiction. The Silent Land addresses the largest unanswered questions and the deepest human concerns from a fresh, wholly original perspective. It is Graham Joyce at his eloquent, visionary best. Don’t let it pass you by.