A Quiet Novel About War

...He is instantly intrigued, to an extent beyond mere professional interest...

...Looking at what appears to be another broch there, he spots a strange glimmer of flame or light...

...They say the silence'll swallow you up...

...Some of Alec's brief meetings with the alluring young woman are lovely...

...While methodically working on a chart of a local broch (a circular fortified stone house with tapered walls, Booth helpfully explains), Alec gazes at a small island across the bay...

...In fact, after leaving Scotland Alec is essentially a passive presence, carefully observing others as he refuses to participate in society...

...indeed, the critical opening half is movingly tranquil...

...It so traumatizes him that he is rendered as mute as the girl of Eilean Tosdach...

...Alec is suddenly filled with pain and an unfamiliar rage...

...For the most part the writing is lyrical but restrained...

...In the best passages Booth resists spelling out what we sense on our own: "The moment we made contact, she gripped my wrist...

...Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr...

...On the same day Alec hears about the fighting breaking out, he receives a letter from his well-connected stepfather, who has arranged for him to serve as a lieutenant...

...His speechlessness seems insufficiently motivated...

...On some level our longing and frustration are intended, but I don't think they have the effect Booth may have hoped for...

...After watching as dozens of his countrymen are struck down by Turkish gunners, Alec focuses on one advancing young lieutenant from his sheltered spot across the beach...

...Instead of looking back wistfully on Alec's devotion to the girl, we wish Booth had explored the loving relationship to see where it might lead...

...Ultimately, though, it is self-defeating...

...Booth—like Ernest Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms, Pat Barker in her World War I trilogy and Michael Ondaatje in The English Patient—relegates brutality and violence mainly to the ominous background, choosing to focus instead on the quiet values war destroys...

...This work is not merely another in a long line of antiwar fictions...

...He is not truly resisting anything—except, strangely, speaking—and comes across to his caretakers and even to the reader as a sad, resigned man not fully alive...

...Outside the rain began to ease.' Though the physical contact does not go much further, Alec is touched in a way that reverberates through his entire life...

...The chapters about Alec's hospitalization are the weakest ones...

...Despite some fine prose, these chapters also suffer most from a basic problem that to some degree afflicts the whole book: Neither pacifism nor silence is very engaging...

...Although an inevitable combat scene serves as the climax, the prospect of war does not arise till midway through the book...

...And he does not disappoint with the silky slant rhyme that is the title of his new offering, Islands of Silence...

...He would probably be released if he spoke up, since he is more grieving than insane, so his obstinate refusal tries ourpatience...

...Alec reports the sight to the innkeeper, Duncan Ogilvy, who functions as the local historian...

...The one moment when Alec truly puts himself on the line occurs during combat on the beach in Gallipoli, and its drama stands out in stark relief...

...The girl exhibits none of the inhibitions acquired by the rest of us during the process psychologists call socialization...

...There he states his opposition to warfare with typically English eloquence: "Whilst national borders may shift and kingdoms expand and contract, there is little else of benefit to be gained...

...Showing us the end while providing the reason for it piecemeal makes for an intriguing structure...

...Alec then learns from Ogilvy that the girl was part of a perverse yet fascinating experiment by the former "laird" of the estate, Robert Maclntyre...

...With great reluctance, he agrees to find a boater to take Alec to the island...

...When I returned her look, she averted her eyes...

...We feel Alec's enchantment with considerable force, albeit less in the over-the-top scene where she poses for him to draw a sketch than in their previous encounters...

...He performs competently during his training, but on his first day in action in Gallipoli he witnesses an especially gruesome death...

...For ages writers have preached peace from the top of the ramparts, seeking to evoke outrage by unsparingly depicting the horrors of battle...

...As they try to pull him to safety, Cody's head is blown off...

...From there the War and its aftermath dominate the narrative...

...Subsequent visits reveal that "the girl" lives with an older couple, seemingly her parents or guardians, and that the three indeed subsist in a manner nearly untouched by civilization, let alone modernity...

...Unlike the similar opening to Terrence Malick's film of James Jones' The Thin Red Line, however, the Scotland section of Islands of Silence fails to sustain us through all that lies ahead...

...His 1998 novel about the effects of life in the Gulag, short-listed for the Booker Prize, was called The Industry of Souls...

...Alec's later life, which we are given inklings of early on, is spent in silence at a psychiatric institution...

...Booth has also done scripts for television movies, and here he unfortunately resorts to the clumsy exposition and hoary clichés common to the form...

...twice she places his hand on her breast simply for the feel of it...

...Once he reaches the island, Alec comes upon a young woman who is apparently mute and dresses in a manner more suited to the prehistoric era he studied in college...

...Ogilvy conveniently summarizes the mysterious lore about supernatural forces on Eilean Tosdach, "The Island of Silence," trying in vain to keep Alec from going there: "It's a place of no return...

...rather, it fits firmly in a narrower genre that might be dubbed the novel of pacifism...

...Granted, Alec is not meant to be Gandhi, but he is supposed to seize our interest and gain our empathy...

...But the novel is better than that line suggests, and some of its strongest pages follow...

...He repeated the scheme of a 15th-century Scottish king by installing his newborn bastard daughter on the isolated island with two deaf mutes to serve as her parents, largely to see what sort of language she might develop...

...The first-person narrator, Alec Marquand, an Englishman newly graduated from university with a degree in archeology, travels to a remote coastal village in the Scottish Highlands in 1914 to take a job surveying the ruins of an Iron Age settlement on a wealthy man's land...

...He whips off a short note of refusal, declaring he will not do battle in any role, and soon finds himself arrested and taken to court in London...

...The lieutenant hesitates for a second and is hit by a sniper's bullet that twists him around like a rag doll...

...With her other hand, she spread my fingers out, one by one, pushing in on the palm as if my flesh were made of clay and she was shaping it into a concave vessel...

...All the while, she watched my face, her mouth slightly open, her breath misting in the damp air...

...He persuades Alec to serve as a noncombatant with a team of front-line emergency medics, driving the ambulance and doing basic triage...

...are two of the very few nonviolent protesters ever to attract widespread attention, and that was primarily because they expressed themselves so powerfully...

...He and another medic, Cody, crawl across the unprotected ground to help the dying man...

...That clever touch of paradox—echoing somewhat the name of another Booth book, Toys of Glass— reflects the kind of pleasure he excels in: a gentle, melancholy buzz...

...The older Alec barely interacts with anyone and has no effect on the world...

...Our regret is directed not at the path Alec's life has taken but at how the novel itself has veered away from its promising beginnings...

...Alec has been in jail several months when a lawyer hired by the "No-Conscription Fellowship" comes to his aid...

...Introducing a primitive, dazzlingly pure female is an old device—take Eve, for a particularly early example—yet Booth executes it freshly...

...Within the realm of fiction, A Farewell to Arms and The English Patient succeeded as relatively calm antiwar books largely because— let's be honest—they had great love stories to carry them...

...Maclntyre died with the girl only able to make bleating noises, but the artificial family lived on, given basic supplies once a year, as before, by the current landowner...

...The early scenes with the mute girl are clearly meant to serve as hints of the wonderful possibilities of life precluded by the savagery found at Gallipoli: "I thought how good it would be if the world were like her, unknowing and unwise in the artifice of destruction...