"A bold attempt to portray the greyness of growing up without roots
or identity, cast adrift in an uncomprehending and uncertain
world." Caroline Moorehead, Times Literary Supplement. March, 1945.
The ravaged face of London will soon be painted with victory, but
for Sylvie, the private battle for peace is just beginning. When
one of her twins is stillborn, she is faced with a consuming grief
for the child she never had a chance to hold. A Small Dark Quiet
follows a mother as she struggles to find the courage to rebuild
her life and care for an orphan whom she and her husband, Gerald,
adopt two years later. Born in a concentration camp, the orphan's
early years appear punctuated with frail speculations, opening up a
haunting space that draws Sylvie to bring him into parallel with
the child she lost. When she gives the orphan the stillborn child's
name, this unwittingly entangles him in a grief he will never be
able to console. His own name has been erased, his origins blurred.
Arthur's preverbal trauma begins to merge with the loss he carries
for Sylvie, released in nightmares and fragments of emerging
memories to make his life that of a boy he never knew. He learns
all about 'that other little Arthur', yearning both to become him
and to free himself from his ghost. He can neither fit the shape of
the life that has been lost nor grow into the one his adopted
father has carved out for him. As the novel unfolds over the next
twenty years, Arthur becomes curious about his Jewish heritage, but
fears what this might entail - drawn towards it, it seems he might
find a sense of communion and acceptance, but the chorus of
persecutory voices he has internalised becomes too overwhelming to
bear. He is threatened as a child with being sent back where he
belongs but no one can tell him where this is. He wanders as an
adult looking for purpose but is unable to find his place. Feeling
an imposter both at home and in the city, Arthur's yearning for
that sense of belonging echoes in our own time. Meeting Lydia seems
to offer Arthur the opportunity to recast himself, yet all too soon
he is trapped in a repetition of what he was trying to escape. A
past he can neither recall nor forget lives on within him even as
he strives to forge a life for himself. Survival, though, insists
Arthur keeps searching and as he opens himself to the world around
him, there are flashes of just how resilient the human heart can
be. Through Sylvie's unprocessed grief and Arthur's acute sense of
displacement, A Small Dark Quiet explores how the compulsion to
fill the empty space death leaves behind ultimately makes the
devastating void more acute. Yet however frail, the instinct for
empathy and hope persists in this powerful story of loss, migration
and the search for belonging.
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