‘The Rest is Silence’ by Scott Fotheringham

Reviewed by Joanna Graham

Scott Fotheringham’s first novel, The Rest is Silence, begins with an unnamed narrator living off a patch of land called Forest Garden on a mountain in Nova Scotia. His winters are spent huddling in a canvas tent, and his summers are full of determined labour and devouring blackflies. His life is hard yet rewarding as a quiet escape from a stressful, polluted city.

While the narrator builds his life in the wilderness, the outside world falls apart due to plastic degradation, which causes food shortages, computer and electrical failings, and the inability of hospitals to store or perform blood transfusions. The destruction of certain plastics is the result of Benny’s work. Benny is a female graduate student in New York developing bacteria that will destroy specific types of plastic. The narrator tells her story to one of his neighbours, Art. For most of the novel the story alternates between the narrator’s experiences in the wilderness and Benny’s experiences in New York, which end up being closely related.

The novel’s precise, straightforward descriptive prose is very well suited to the narrator’s experiences, conveying quiet contentment, beauty, and endurance. Biking over his patch of land, which he has tended throughout the novel, the narrator says:

The two of us created something from nothing more than dreams and effort. We have eaten simple meals of rice and olive oil, peas, cut chives, onions, and garlic. We worked hard every day until light failed, night fell, and then we dreamed some more.

Yet it is all so fragile. August, laughing with the land’s gift of tomatoes, onions, carrots, and blueberries, has passed. November is over there scolding me for thinking that such bounty could continue.

In these sections the writing style helps the plot to flow easily even when entire seasons pass in a few chapters, or sentences:

The autumn here was gorgeous. Little rain until mid-November, lots of time to walk in the woods, put the garden to bed, and read in my tent. But the snow came before Christmas and was followed by rain. Then more snow. It’s been a hard winter and it’s only January 26.

The prose is well written in the New York sections, although its steady pace does not reflect the chaotic aspects of the city it is describing as well as when it is illustrating the gradual development of the Nova Scotia land:

The drone of traffic came through the open window, regularly interrupted by taxi horns and sirens heading down 70^th to the hospital’s emergency department. They heard shouting on the street and Benny went to the window to look out.

While it is describing loud, aggravating sounds the prose makes the scene more subdued than perhaps it should be. Also, in the city sections, some of the details about Benny’s life drag on slightly.

One of the novel’s themes is the polluted state of the earth. The narrator notices that UV rays, acid rain, and pesticides in the water are damaging frogs, as a species, so he says good-bye to frogs in a way that makes the reader feel for the species and the narrator as he recognizes that loss. The narrator also takes note of diseases that he says were once rare but are now surfacing regularly such as H1N1 and SARS. In these passages the reader feels the narrator’s sadness as he watches these changes occur in front of him.

The novel’s themes of pollution vs. nature, and creation vs. destruction, along with its two settings, create a situation where it might be tempting for a novelist to develop strict binaries. However, The Rest is Silence emphasizes overlap and connection between its themes, which makes its content more interesting and thought provoking. Moments of creation are also moments of destruction, and opinions on city living versus living in Forest Garden are presented as the narrator’s own, so there is room for disagreement from his neighbours, from Benny’s experiences, and from the reader. But nature and urbanity are not isolated from each other. The narrator’s surroundings are not free from the effects of pollution, and there are falcons nesting in New York.

The narrator deals with his own isolation as well as his role in the disaster of the outside world. His need to tell Benny’s story to Art is also an attempt to reach out to a distant relative when all his other relationships are gone. The narrator’s memories of his personal losses are where the novel gains sympathy for him. It is surprising and upsetting when Lina, his love interest and partner for part of the novel, initially rejects him, and it is genuinely sad when their relationship ends. However, the most emotional impact comes from the narrator trying to make sense of his father’s death.

A significant part of the narrator’s story in the wilderness is memories of his childhood, most of which revolve around his father. He says that he confuses his father’s memories with his own and explains he started having nightmares after his father’s death. The novel’s title refers to the silence his losses leave behind, something made poignant by the fact the narrator found a pair of skates on his bed after his father’s suicide, but not a note. This image haunts you like it haunts the narrator because it remains unexplained. The novel’s prose is most effective when the narrator is coming to terms with his own losses:

You lie in pain in a hospital bed and are jabbed with a morphine-filled needle after all that love and effort and suffering, and you have nothing left to say. You fall in a lake and water fills your mouth, your lungs, and you have nothing left to say. The rest is silence.

For those left behind that silence is insistent, impossible to ignore, like bats in the ceiling and the arms of trees scratching against your roof.

“Nothing stays the same for long, especially joy,” Fotheringham writes, and this idea stretches over the whole novel. The narrator’s relationship with his father was lost to alcoholism and suicide, and his relationships with Lina and Art end as well. The narrator watches a world where plastic cannot last and neither can frogs; aspects of the world are broken down as the narrator builds a garden and a cabin on an isolated patch of land. The effect of time is also discussed in the novel. The separation of two people is compared to the separation of Nova Scotia and Morocco, and the narrator realizes that 500 years into the future there will be no sign of his garden and cabin.

The Rest is Silence is a surprisingly moving read. At the beginning, the reader might expect a political narrative about environmentalism, but Fotheringham adds a lot more to his novel. It is powerful, not because of political or environmental preaching, but because of the narrator’s personal story and how it affects the way he sees his world. He still finds patches of beauty on a planet he is convinced humans will destroy, he accepts the losses he will continue to endure, but he finds a place for himself on a Nova Scotia mountain. These perspectives are beautiful, sad, refreshing and well worth reading.

Goose Lane | 330 pages |  $29.95 | cloth | ISBN #978-0864926562