Mind Picker: The Listeners

Tom, the Earth is making us aware of itself in the most extraordinary way. And you can choose to listen or can choose not to. But I am listening. Because I have been given the gift of being able to. And so have you.

The first line of Jordan Tannahill’s Giller Prize-nominated The Listeners is: The chances are that you have, at some point, stumbled upon the viral meme of me screaming naked in front of a bank of news cameras, and if nothing else, learning what brings a suburban wife/mother/English teacher to the point of screaming naked in public was an intriguing hook that kept me turning the pages. Along the way, this gets deeply philosophical about our times — about the conflict between belief and disbelief as it concerns faith, women’s health, conspiracy theories, etc. — and Tannahill makes this equally entertaining and thought-provoking. I like reading fiction in an attempt to learn about how others live, and if I have a complaint here, it’s that Tannahill writes from the POV of an American woman (when he is neither American nor a woman; this is Tannahill’s imagined narrative of how such a person lives), but as I can understand that his particular plot would be experienced most intensely by this particular American woman (at least as how I imagine that woman’s life to be), this perspective was only mildly distracting to me. An overall fine read, rounded up to four stars.

The thing I still struggle to wrap my head around is how did something so small, so innocuous precipitate the complete unravelling of my life. How all of this soul-searching, transcendence, and devastation could begin with a low and barely perceptible sound.

One night, as she was getting ready to fall asleep, forty-year-old Claire Devon first heard The Hum; a super low frequency, diffuse droning that seems to be coming from everywhere and nowhere at once. No one else in her circle of family or friends can hear it, and as Claire becomes sleep-deprived and made to feel a bit crazy, she is relieved when first a student in her class and then a neighbourhood group come forward as people who can also hear The Hum. Despite knowing how dangerous it is to be seen fraternising with a student outside of class (not to mention texting and offering consoling hugs), Claire can’t help but join seventeen-year-old Luke in his efforts to track down the source of the noise; and when they discover the neighbourhood group and joining it causes estrangement from their families, the reader has to wonder: at what point does a group of people, sleep-deprived and isolated, joining together to seek transcendence, cease to be a support group and becomes a cult? The choices that Claire makes along the way are credible for her character, but like when you’re watching a horror movie, you can’t help but repeatedly shout out, “No! Why are you doing that?!”

Until that evening and my conversation with Ashley on the staircase, I don’t think I fully grasped the extent to which hysteria was a psychic wound that we as women still bore; a wound inflicted from centuries of our symptoms, our instincts about our own bodies, our pleasures and afflictions, always being the first to be discounted and discredited, even by other women. Even by our own daughters, as the case may be. It was a wound that we still carried, because we could, at any moment, have an entire history called upon to silence us in a word, in an instant.

The Listeners is, at heart, a piece of Millennial feminist fiction. When Claire first hears The Hum, her husband wants to be supportive, but eventually pressures her to seek help; to medicate and get therapy. Claire makes a point of telling us that she became an English teacher in order to counter the patriarchal, homophobic, white male literary canon that’s taught to high school students. She tells us that she was a polyamorous riot grrrl before she met her husband; she’s sex positive enough to have given her daughter a vibrator for her fourteenth birthday; when she first meets the others in the neighbourhood group, she fields “some pretty strong toxic masculinity vibes” from one guy, an aging couple were “definitely a bit OK Boomer”. In this first meeting, it’s noted that the men are dominating the conversation (a retired academic mansplains what he thinks is causing the noise, the old man wants to write cranky letters to the city, the ex-military guy wants to talk Deep State), whereas the women are relieved to finally have others to talk to about their personal experiences (they are listeners). When Claire is alone at home one night and thinks a stranger is in her yard, she tells us, “I don’t think anyone who isn’t a woman living on her own can fully appreciate the amount of time we spend imagining and fearing this exact scenario.” And again, as Tannahill isn’t “a woman living on her own”, I was brought out of the story by him telling me this; by his telling me what it’s like to be a woman going through this entire experience.

But this is about more than feminism. In an early scene, we learn that Claire is a staunch atheist, pleased to have saved her husband from his fundamentalist Christian upbringing, but Paul finds himself, in middle age, being drawn back to the faith of his youth. When Claire, with her group, discovers a way of tuning into The Hum, of finding a way to transcend reality in a way that hints at something more than base materialism, she finds herself intensely challenged; apparently losing one’s disbelief can be as traumatic as losing one’s faith. And the ex-military man introduces some credible conspiracy theories about what could be causing The Hum: if the Deep State isn’t actually causing it, you can be sure they know about it and are monitoring this group (the government are also listeners). As this story is set in Texas (at least I think it is, Paul is from Amarillo), I was put in mind of Waco and the Branch Davidians; and we know how that ended. In Tannahill’s last novel, what I would call the underrated Liminal, he wrote:

And it's of course considered obscene, to transcend our bodies — whether through sex, drugs, or a suicide belt. For the self to consciously cleave itself apart from the body. There's a horror in having agency in the act. It destabilizes that which is thought to be fixed: that only God or the universe or fate can unfix these two parts of our being. That sacred union. Our body, the temple. And in that moment I understood “sacred” as belonging to a language of limits, a word which demarcated boundaries we were not prepared to cross for fear of destabilizing the accepted order, for fear of realizing how far our bodies could actually stretch, transform, how much pleasure they could hold, how extreme they could be made, how fluid and porous they really were, because to realize those potentials might have meant remaking all the containers — physical, social, political –— that held the world in place.

The Listeners would appear to be another way of examining this same theme, but more rooted in reality than Liminal was. And for the questions it raises and explores, I found this to be a totally worthwhile read.