Edinburgh and London based Freelance writer and reviewer, Claire Bell reviews Sarah Maitland’s 'A Book of Silence'.

A Book of Silence finds and leaves Sara Maitland on her Galloway doorstep, alone with the sound of a match striking. This is a modern tale of a modern hermit, and Maitland's approach is rational. It is a thorough working through of silence that takes for its starting point John Cage's assertion that the notion true silence is fallacious (always the noise of blood pumping, the nervous system spinning), and runs beyond it.

The book is a challenge to default thought that silence (and often solitude) equate with lack; othered, in response to something else, and in need of a frame in order that we should recognise it. The notion of the space between all things, and using white space as a means of drawing attention to what it isn't, is nothing new, and an increasingly popular cultural tic. The zombie space - the tipping point - is the bones of deconstruction and postmodern thinking. Strand it here however, and silence remains limited; active only in its negative capability. Following a friend's letter along these lines, which posits silence as a nothingness waiting to be broken, Maitland is moved to seek what happens beyond this movement. A Book of Silence is an attempt to alienate us from the process of socially contained silence. Unshackling it as an energetic force in itself, agency is conferred on the silence; the onus is on shedding light in dark corners.

A lifelong urban dweller and skilled conversationalist, at forty Maitland had found herself pulled out. Relocation to County Durham gave way to a greater sense that deeper investment and immersion in silence called, prefiguring a move to Galloway where she now lives in a self-built nod to the traditional hermitage. Using the trails of hermits past as lanterns, from Hildegard of Bingen and Thomas Merton to Thoreau and a contemporary in Annie Dillard, she sets first about unpacking the relationship between the interchangeability of solitude and silence. For forty days and forty nights, she relocates to Skye, avoiding human contact, and recording the effects in the manner of Captain's log. The results range from a sense of disinhibition, auditory hallucinations and what she refers to as a sense of givenness. The experience becomes both an extreme initiation into silence and a foundation on which to draw - a measure and a personal source material for the whole journey.

The dark side of silence needed attention. Maitland draws a thin and leading line between the side effects of a flotation tank and mechanisms of solitary confinement or sensory deprivation sanctioned by torture. The essential difference is the choice - or not - of the person undergoing the silence, and this impacts massively on the ensuing regenerative or destructive fall out. Many descriptions of the experiences that occur during silence and solitude skirt close to conceptions of madness. Hearing voices or singing amidst silence can be a product of interpreting ambient noise as words. This is prevalent at sea, where the combination of silence, solitude, and the creaking and groaning of both the human body and the sailing ship unify to produce a chorus of mythical sounds. So sailors tell tales of siren songs. Understanding through the realm of interpretation leaves itself exposed to delirium: how do we learn to discern or choose to discern whether they stem from an inner self or external force?

Later, travelling to the Sinai desert, the dual poles of sanctuary and adventure conflate to explode Maitland's sense of self and sensitise her to extraneous sounds and voices that seem both received and inner. The desert hermit's pilgrimage to vast open empty space is a melting of all boundaries: silence becomes a test of the limits of the self, and the book an enquiry into how far into the remote part it is sustainable to go. Here, the path makes it's most productive divergence in Maitland's quest. Two different models for silence emerge: the Romantic, who covets solitude for fortification against the world and finds creative output within these firm boundaries - the image of the writer in the turret - is juxtaposed with the opened out wanderer, alone and all connected, infinite, self-less and less preoccupied with words. Soon after, Maitland wakes to a mass of Highland stars - a blanket display only possible miles from a city - and catches herself reaching for story through which to know them. This moment shifts suddenly into the absurd, consequently dwarfing narrative. An unanticipated result is that during her eight year apprenticeship with silence, she ceases to write fiction. Words come, but without plot. It's an intriguing crisis for a novelist at a juncture where autobiography, fiction and non-fiction have begun to intersect as never before. At the book's conclusion, Maitland is still seeking a balance between artistic isolation where the ego is fortified, and a solitude that dissolves the line between the self and the world. The concluding quandary is a work in progress: can we - and if so how - exist as an egoless being and still create? And is all creation necessarily a generous means of stamping our own identity on the world?

Maitland is particularly interesting in her dissection of the ego's attachment to speech and identity forming stories we tell of and to ourselves with each utterance. Narcissism is problematised, which is in part what makes this account of hermitude so contemporary. And still, within a hermetic endeavour there is clearly a Romantic vision of the self as outsider, mystic or poet (and there are unexplored ironies in she and Rosseau's shared inhabitance at the bottom of their mother's gardens). A Book of Silence utilises its inherent contradictions to draw attention to the way we often fearfully frame silence as defence against acknowledging the way we frame ourselves through language and narrative. There are many innate paradoxes to traverse here: the most obvious is the double-bind of writing as a means of expressing the ineffable. How do we understand silence with words as our tools? Are we trying to journey into or away from the semiotic?

A lighter puzzle is the dance around the hermit's tenet of hospitality. Most striking is that Maitland strives to meet these varied manifestations of silence on their own terms, before weighing and absorbing them into rigorous daily routines. Unplugging the phone; three hours of meditative prayer daily. This trajectory transforms what could have remained as experiment into an integrated way of being in the world. She is learning to balance a rejection of the large sweeps of cacophonous modern life, including technological objects designed to service, but performing their functions more noisily and invasively than tasks they replace: washing machines, cars etc. Her life is not stripped of all mod cons. She utilises elements; the stockpiled freezer is of particular benefit to those preparing for solitude - and internet connection offers the opportunity of long distance teaching and to that most valued end, freedom. It will however come as no surprise that she doesn't own a mobile phone. For her, the most costly of our advancing technologies are those devised for communication yet inverting it.

Maitland's point is, I think, that the pursuit and use of silence is an active role for the seeker; a way of saying no, of rejecting a passive immersion in prescribed ways of living. A Book of Silence is as much a paean to Romantic exile as it is a robust call to arms for the discipline of listening to ourselves, and against trying to locate ourselves from the outside. Of not taking the time to consider how we want to live, and readily assimilating distractions. Her skill steers the book clear of what could easily become a self-satisfied Good Life tract. She is neither sanctimonious nor whimsical, and her conversational insights deliver psychological punch. How much of the world we carry with us is a personal choice and this serves as a well-aimed prod to remember it.

Reviewed by Claire Bell