Strategic silence

In Jesse Ball’s inventive new novel, the protagonist travels to Japan and delves into a bizarre, decades-old mass-murder case, Saul Austerlitz writes.

Jesse Ball’s Silence Once Begun, which reads like a true-crime paperback, tries to find insight from a decades-old Japanese crime. istockphoto.com

The manifesto for Jesse Ball’s uncategorisable hybrid novel Silence Once Begun shows up unexpectedly about two-thirds of the way through this brisk but mysterious work. It is diverted to his narrator – also named Jesse Ball – and his memories of a book about an Austrian huntsman and his miraculous ability to find any and all lost objects “because he would not look for them”: “He did not permit the previously drawn categories of objects that had been set before him in the world to stop up his eyes and halt his discoveries.”

Ball the author operates on similar principles, and so we have this novel that reads like a true-crime paperback, and is structured like an instructional manual. The book’s main character is shattered when his wife unexpectedly ceases speaking to him and travels to Japan to seek consolation and insight, from a decades-old case involving a man named Oda Sotatsu, who was arrested and sentenced to death after confessing to a rash of disappearances of elderly men and women. Oda is innocent, yet refuses to speak up in his own defence.

Jesse pores through transcripts and interviews witnesses and family members in the hopes of understanding Oda’s perverse stance. “If it was a joke,” a journalist who covered the case observes, “it was the strangest joke in the world.”

Ball’s novel is hardly a joke, but it is something of a dare, seeking to slather its compelling central mystery in intentionally banal quasi-official language.

We are never free to fully enter the story of the silent man on death row, restrained as we are by the presence of the narrator, simultaneously the author and not. Storytelling is an escape from our own lives and the most effective means yet found of tunnelling more deeply into those lives, in the hopes of coming out the other side, purified. “In searching for a way out of my own troubles, I had found my way into the troubles of others, some long gone, and now I was trying to find my way back out, through their troubles, as if we human beings can ever learn from one another.”

“Silence,” ambivalent as it is about communication, embraces a style we might call “official reportese”. Language is flattened, its vigour and wit intentionally compressed, as if to assure readers that we were merely receiving a witness statement. But in reaching beyond the “previously drawn categories of objects,” Ball compresses – intentionally or otherwise – his book’s effect. There is simply too much banality, intentional or otherwise, to wade through before Ball begins to lay out the book’s intricate puzzle in detail.

The narrator apologises for wanting “again and again, to intercede and explain things”, but, if anything, there is not enough intercession and explanation in the book’s first half, which drags unnecessarily with the litany of testimony and interview. Ball interrupts his narrative repeatedly to offer carefully categorised lists and sub-lists, as if to subtly mock the dutifulness of his namesake and narrator’s investigation. But boredom is boredom, whether it is unintentional or deliberate.

Silence’s witnesses contradict each other, dawdle, dissemble and insist that others are not to be trusted. Oda’s father only articulates most clearly what each of the book’s characters implicitly argues: “You shouldn’t listen to the others. This is what we are saying, that I am telling you the things now that you can use. We are talking about that.” Was Oda’s sister close with her brother or did she disdain his company? Was a love affair between Oda and a mysterious stranger a genuine romance?

The intellectual and emotional conflict between witnesses underscores the dictum, offered up late in the book, “that we as humans believe we see things we do not see”. And silence itself becomes a response to the dullness and heartache of mundane life. The less we say, the more we transcend the pettiness of blame and guilt and regret. Ball trusts silence where words have grown stale and unprofitable. But can a novel ever embrace silence as a strategy? A clutch of photographs midway through the book hints at a path through the impasse. In Sebaldian fashion, a series of still images hints mutely at Oda’s destiny. The gates to a seemingly endless driveway are thrown open, an eternity of calm about to commence. Where words no longer suffice, silence must serve instead.

Saul Austerlitz is the author of Sitcom: A History in 24 Episodes from I Love Lucy to Community.