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‘He began opening and shutting his mouth, making ungodly noises deep in his throat, the muscles in his face and neck working as if he were choked by something terrible.’
Imagine being powerless to hear, or to speak. One of my favourite childhood books, written twelve years ago by New Zealander Sherryl Jordan, explores the powerlessness of this raging quiet. It is a narrative about prejudice raging against diversity, superstition against rationality, and silence against communication. A newly married sixteen-year old and her much older husband pass a youth, bloodied and tied, on the journey to their new home. Villagers are whipping the devils out of the mad boy. His eyes, an unusual violet-grey, are age-old, and sad. Little does Marnie realise that his fate, the fate of an outsider, will become hers.
Whilst Isake drunkenly lurches to the alehouse Marnie waits in the rain, contemplating the loss of her home, a rural farming community, for this tiny ruined cottage by the sea. A hard-working overseer’s daughter, Marnie has married the son of the lord of the manor in exchange for the welfare of her family and twelve siblings. Their new home is in Torcurra, a close-knit, insular fishing hamlet with a fear of anything different or strange. Sherryl Jordan sets the story indeterminately in medieval England, not wanting to force a historical specificity or particular time onto its events.
The boy they saw is called Raver by the villagers because of his unintelligible, frightening raving. But Marnie sees something else in him; something otherworldly, ageless, and wild. He is houseless, sleeping in an underground crypt, although he finds his home anywhere under the stars. Father Brannan, a kindly priest, also misinterprets his ravings. In attempting to articulate himself, Raver’s strange wild sounds and incoherent choking generates accusations of devilry and madness. He himself does not understand that he is different; he does not understand that he is deaf.
It is Marnie who eventually diagnoses his voicelessness as deafness. She renames him Raven, after the priest points out that ‘the ravens in the fields neither sow nor reap, but the Good Lord feeds them.’ Her paralysed father Michael has been similarly ‘locked inside a great quiet;’ a ‘great quiet’ that is debilitating and imprisoning. Having worked closely with profoundly deaf children in schools, Sherryl Jordan acknowledges that ‘all my life I have felt a great affinity with deaf people.’ Marnie decides, therefore, to create a new, visual language of signs and gestures; ‘hand-words’ that she and Raven can communicate with. Their language finds a simplicity and lyricism of expression in ‘moon-fire’ and ‘moon-good beautiful.’ Because Marnie cannot read, she herself learns ‘parchment-words’ from Father Brannan.
Widowed after her husband’s freak death, the protagonist contrasts Isake’s rough sensuality, with his roguish smile, curved red lips and smouldering eyes, to Raven’s gentleness and innocence. When he dances in an ancient stone circle under a silvery sky, finding oneness with the earth, Raven’s body is transfigured by the moonlight. Here, the author’s descriptions of the moonlit natural landscape are beautifully eerie and stark. Father Brannan interrogates Marnie’s instinctive trust in Raven. ‘You were afraid until a madman came, and then you felt safe?’ But when their hand-words are interpreted as signs of sorcery Marnie is accused of witchcraft. The sudden arrival of Isake’s brother further complicates the plot, setting the village dangerously against the two outsiders.
The Raging Quiet equates deafness, madness, and witchcraft. It is a book about losing and gaining language, as it is about prejudice and ignorance. Written with an elegant economy of words, Sherryl Jordan’s narrative has an understated but haunting vividness. For the villagers of Torcurra, Marnie and Raven will always be the witch and the madman; but a witch and a madman who have forged a new language, a new life, and a new love.
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