You think of yourself as a moderately well-read person. And then you come across a book so brilliant, so moving, so enchanting, by an author you had not even heard of, and your world is henceforth altered. You feel a bit like John Keats when he came across a translation of Homer that knocked him out: “Then felt I like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken.”
For me, that new planet is
a new novel by Irish writer Peter Cunningham. First published in Ireland in 2008, the novel recently was published in the United States by Gemma. It begins during World War II and ends in the 1970s, but the narrative is not straightforward — reminding us that the people we know are likely carrying around worlds inside them, events and emotions we haven’t the foggiest notion of, but ones that very well might be influencing everything they do and are.
“The Sea and the Silence” is a love story, and a war story, and it’s beautifully told in that lilting, low-key style that syncopates the work of so many great Irish writers, such as William Trevor, John McGahern and John Banville: “As I stared, by one of those miracles of light, the sea shone as if all the silver of the world was buried just beneath its surface.”
The last 20 or so pages will hold you especially spellbound. You can sense what’s going to happen but not how — and that, come to think of it, is the way it is with life itself. The end is inescapable: All of us eventually die. But what we do before that moment — whom we love, how we live — is the subject of this brutal, luminous, unforgettable book.
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