Mountain Devil

Recommend: No

The Silence is the first DeLillo novel (well, this is more a novella) that I have read. I found Zero K at a street library years ago and gave it to Declan but he got about 20% of the way through the book and then shelved it. This is the kiss of death for a book. It will never be touched again. Declan’s spurning of Zero K did put me off DeLillo until The Silence came out. It has a post-apocalyptic plot and a sub-150 page count and a funky type face.

From the beginning, it’s clear that you are in the hands of a seasoned author. The first chapter is my favourite and is the most terrifying to me. An older rich American couple are on a flight back from a holiday in Paris. Right at the end of the journey, as the plane commences its descent into New York, an event occurs. A disturbance. A calamity. It’s hard to pin down what has happened and it’s unclear how widespread the impact. But the plane crash lands.

For someone brutally terrified of flying, this was an extremely uncomfortable and tense scene. The writing is terse and triggering.

The bouncing became severe, altitude, air temperature, speed, he kept reading the screen but saying nothing. They were drowning in noise. A woman came staggering down the aisle, returning to the front row after a visit to the toilet, grabbing the seatbacks for balance. Voices on the intercom, one of the pilots in French and then one of the attendants in English, and he thought that he might resume reading aloud from the screen but decided this would be a case of witless persistence in the midst if mental and physical distress. She was looking at him now, not writing just looking, and it occurred to him that he ought to move his seat upright and she slid her food tray into the slot and put her notebook and pen in the seat pocked. A massive knocking somewhere below them. The screen went blank. Pilot speaking French, no English follow-up. Jim gripped the arms of his seat and then checked Tessa’s seatbelt and retightened his. He imagined that every passenger was looking straight ahead into the six o’clock news, at home, on Channel 4, waiting for word of their crashed airliner.

What a supurb piece of writing. My heart is beating faster. I feel like I am there. The stress builds so quickly. The pilots announcements, surely not harbingers of good news, are echoed by the flight attendants in English but within a few sentences even this procedure falls by the wayside. The couple begin acting out scenes, unprompted, from the safety briefing they probably ignored at the beginning of the flight (seat upright, tray tables away). The phrase ‘witless persistence’ speaks to how futile anything they do now is. Their fate is sealed, awaiting. And then the end of the paragraph is so strong – it brings the absolute terror of the situation home – this is a catastrophe of such large scale that it feels like something that can only happen to other people, in other countries, on the news.

This was DeLillo at his best. But he doesn’t maintain that intensity, which he really should be able to given the low word count of this novella.

So something has happened in New York, and maybe the whole world, we don’t know. No TVs work. No phones work. Technology has come to a standstill.

It’s an intriguing concept: what if it just all stopped?

There are five central characters, two of which are the couple abord the plane that crash landed into New York. These characters though are poorly designed. It’s not that they are one-dimensional. It’s almost like they have no dimensions. They don’t feel like real people at all. They are paper thin, flimsy things.

We find out that this couple is en route to their friends’ apartment to watch the Super Bowl. Stunned from their crash landing they stumble, by foot, to the apartment. Waiting for them are another couple and an old physics student of the apartment owner’s wife. But these five people don’t interact in any recognisable way, in any configuration. The two couples have very clinical dialogue with their respective partners. The ex-professor and her ex-student have this off energy – deliberately sexual but written very asexually. No one else seems to talk or notice this ex-student (now a professor himself) going into monologues all the time. It’s really fucking weird.

It doesn’t work.

I get the sense DeLillo is trying to outsmart me. Maybe he is trying to say that our intense reliance on technology has left us entirely disparate from one another, but we don’t realise it day to day. It’s only when we have technology taken from us do we see the rot.

Again, an intriguing concept.

But this is not a cohesive enough story. It rambles. It can be unenjoyable to read. It’s persistently abrasive. For example, one husband continuously barks at the blank television as though the Super Bowl is still airing, apparently unable to acknowledge the disaster at hand. When there are only around 100 pages to play with (with rather large text spacing…) dialogue like “De-fense. De-fense. De-fense” in the middle of a scene is annoying.

So much of this book should have been building into an unsettling atmosphere and the unspeakable notion that the world is forever altered. The plot premise is fantastic – the utterly unimaginable possibility that there will be no technology – but the undercurrent should have been the catastrophic implications of the next day, and the day after that. War? Famine? Global collapse? None of these need to be directly referenced but they should underscore every page.

We sort of get that, but mainly we get these odd bursts of dialogue and confusing character interactions. Often paragraphs don’t seem to link to their predecessor. The characters talk individually as if they are on their own live streaming YouTube channel, looking into the distance, not like they in a room with other humans. Here’s a great example of the discordance.

He unbuckles his belt and drops his pants. He stands there, stricken, in his checkered shorts, looking taller than ever. She tells him to say something in German and when he does, a substantial statement recited quickly, she asks for a translation.

He says, “Capitalism is an economic system in which the means of production and distribution are privately or corporately owned, and development is proportionate to the accumulation and reinvestment of profits gained in a free market.”

She nods, half-smiling, and motions for him to lift his trousers and buckle his belt. She finds it satisfying to mimic his belt-buckling. She understands that sex with her former student may be a sleazy little tremor in her mind but it is no where present in her body.

We’ve been lead to think that this woman has desired her ex-student for years. And then the world as they know it is ending. They are alone. They are about to have sex. And then she asks him to speak in German? When it is rant about capitalism, she nods, half-smiling? She decides, split second, after years of yearning, that she doesn’t care to have sex with him?

DeLillo, what is this novel? Who are these people? Are they operating on some random walk at the end of the world?

It is almost deeply unsettling.