Book Review: The Silence of Animals

Author: John Gray
Publisher: Allen Lane (an imprint of Penguin)
Reviewed by Stephen Keim SC

My younger brother, Laurie, and I always exchange books at Christmas. Since they compete with other books I receive, Laurie’s gifts to me do not always get read.

Perhaps, for this reason, Laurie’s gift to me of Christmas 2013 was John Gray’s The Silence of Animals. The Silence is a little book weighing in at just 210 pages. Gray, on the other hand, is a heavyweight, having held down Chairs in History and related topics at Oxford, Harvard, Yale and the London School of Economics. 

In reward for Laurie’s thoughtfulness, I commenced reading The Silence on Boxing Day and finished it, two days later.

The Silence excels as a book list. Gray opens with an extract from Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon describing a group of tree living apes looking with puzzlement upon their Neanderthal neighbours eating raw meat and killing other animals as well as each other. He switches to the post hanging scene in Joseph Conrad’s An Outpost of Progress. (The Silence is not meant to be a joyful book.) Gray concludes with a passage from the Louis MacNiece poem, Mutations.

Gray draws his examples, good and bad, and makes his points from other people’s writing. As a result, along the way, he manages to provide a guide to western literature including a new understanding of the writing of both Freud (tick of approval) and Jung (a cross). Of all the authors mentioned by the Gray (both known to me and completely unheard of), I am most keen to dip into the travel writing of Patrick Leigh Fermor, bon vivant, war hero and absolute Renaissance man.

In The Silence, Gray is keen to look critically upon all myths. He saves his greatest disdain for the myth of progress: the view that, through increasing knowledge or self-knowledge, humanity is improving ethically, socially, materially.

The myth is found in religious and humanist traditions. The myths of science are different to the myths of religion but science, nonetheless, has its myths. History, indubitably, evidences both individuals and communities making the same mistakes and committing the same crimes upon one another, over and over. The downside results of the Arab Spring are tendered as but the latest example. 

The eponymous silence of the animals is contrasted with the internal dialogue of humans. No matter how much we seek silence, our troubled internal conversations continue.

The Silence becomes a search for an answer when there is no answer. The paradoxical answer is that no solution is required: “There is no redemption from being human. But no redemption is required.”

As the passage from MacNiece’s Mutations suggests: Our world view may shatter when we least expect but “new Patterns from new disorders open like a rose”.

Stephen Keim Sc
Clayfield