A disquieting silence lies at the heart of an unusual, repurposed novel

The Silent History began its life as an interactive e-book – so can it translate to old-fashioned printed paper?

Silent children unable to comprehend language are the heart of a clever and humane novel. Christina Benge / Getty Images

The Silent History is a novel with a strange history of its own. The first edition of this 500-page book first appeared in 2013 as a series of apps for the iPad. This Silent History [Amazon.com] uses "serialisation, exploration, and collaboration to tell the story of a generation of unusual children – born without the ability to create or comprehend language, but perhaps with other surprising skills of their own".

It is a novel whose premise sounds like it wants to excavate the very foundations that novels usually employ: to use language to tell a story without it. It is a gauntlet that the authors throw down within the text as well as without: “Words are the least important parts of this story.”

Yet that ambitious mission statement and “those surprising skills” were probably a reference to the digital version’s rather fetching extra-literary features. This first printing, to use an obsolete term, was really a manifesto for what e-books could do, with their capacity for interactive, multimedia texts. The monologues are divided between “Testimonials” and “Field Reports”. Thanks to the wonders of 21st-century GPS, the “Field Reports” would respond if you happened to be in the place where one was set. Good news if you were in Chicago’s O’Hare airport or downtown ­Kyrgyzstan.

This revolution, or at least near-revolution, in storytelling was entirely self-conscious, the result of a collaboration between three writers (the former McSweeney's publisher Eli Horowitz, and Kevin Moffett and Matthew Derby) and McSweeney's digital wizard, Russell Quinn. "E-books were unmistakably a lesser form," said Horowitz, who also wrote the ground-breaking digital children's book The Clock Without a Face.

The second edition of The Silent History (The Silent History 2.0, perhaps) has now been published without its hi-tech gizmos on the old-fangled printed page: the digital guru Quinn is notably absent on the author page, a sign that the book version is little more than a transcript of the finalised text. This form raises intriguing questions. Is The Silent History worth the paper it is now printed on, and does this material form affect how we experience the narrative itself?

The high-concept premise proves to be brilliantly simple, and resounds to echoes of John Wyndham, Stephen King and J G Ballard. Locked in their own world, the silent children communicate only with other “Silents” through an intense form of face recognition. This world devoid of language forces a vastish array of characters to interpret the silence in fairly consistent 1,500 word monologues. A prologue informs us that these are records intended for posterity, but it is one of many smart twists that the urgency of the process is only revealed at the end.

This technique posits the children not as absences but as mirrors revealing an individual’s underlying character. We have the often desperate parents of Silent children, who vacillate between fear and love, intimidation and sorrow, disappointment and longing. Patti Kern, a cultish new-age Earth mother, reads the children as embodying a long-lost purity and innocence. A politician exploits this new constituency to make his name, but later backtracks when the populace turns against the silent minority.

The plot’s pivotal moment arrives with the invention of a cure, which many Silents accept and, once it is made mandatory, a minority reject. The focus for the final volumes is a young family (Flora, Spencer and their Christ-like son Theo) who flee the enforced corrective procedure. The beautifully modulated ebb and flow of these concluding sections sets the world of words and silence on a philosophical collision course. Does language imprison or set us free? If something – a person, an object, an emotion, a mind – cannot be named, does it still exist (and if so, how)? Can there be community without communication?

Read on old-fashioned paper, these interrogations feel very last millennium – Shelley's A Defence of Poetry pondered similar brainteasers in 1821. Downloaded onto an iPad, they encourage similarly open-ended meditations about contemporary culture. Are the authors anxious about an iGeneration locked in exclusive, silent(ish) cyber-communion with one other? Or are they celebrating simply the next stage of youth culture rising inexorably from the ashes of the old?

It is one of The Silent History's many virtues that weighing the alternatives proves so very enjoyable. The plot more than stands on its own two feet, driven by classic narrative virtues: chases, hints of the supernatural, a dystopian thriller, intellectual mystery and cosmic jigsaw puzzle. The finale asks the biggest questions of all, suggesting that here is a novel at once fun, clever and humane with the scope to outlast its hipper-than-thou origins. "Let the unknown be the unknown. The things we need will reveal themselves in time."

James Kidd is a freelance reviewer based in London.