To return to where we began, Joyce’s novel may start in a familiar territory, but it’s where it finishes and the emotions that it explores along the way that really matter. If partnership, the slog and joy of marriage, is one of the book’s major themes, another is death and loss – in particular, how do we carry on when faced with these? Without giving too much of the ending away, Joyce’s answer seems to be bound up with the idea that humans have an innate ability to cling to life until there’s really no point in holding on any further. There’s another reason the book is so compelling. The result is a book that’s as crisp as new snow, even to the point where you sometimes long for more detail, for Joyce to linger on a scene as a novelist working from a literary fiction tradition might. Most importantly, here are the dynamics of a relationship shown in close-up.Ĭonsidering that The Silent Land is hardly a long novel, Joyce does all this without ever wasting words or lingering on detail once he’s made his point. Here’s a sudden revelation of infidelity and why, while it matters, it’s no reason to have a marriage-ending strop.

But each time they find themselves back in the village. As the days go by they wait for rescue, then try to leave. They struggle back to the village and find it deserted. And like that trick of King's, I cared about Zoe and Jake because they remind me of people I care about, they remind me about caring.As the couple’s ordeal runs to days that blur into each other, Joyce sketches out the emotional landscape of their marriage. A young couple are caught in an avalanche during a ski-ing holiday in the French Alps. I've said on this blog quite a few times how I admire Stephen King's ability to capture the humanity of his characters, their dreams, loves and hopes, and Joyce achieves a similar success in this novel. It is a testament to Joyce's skill as a writer, as an observer, I guess, that Zoe and Jake seemed so real, had that every man/every woman quality that leads the reader to suspend the disbelief and take on board the more fantastic elements of the story without noticing. It is not overstating it one bit to say that if this characterisation hadn't worked, the novel would have collapsed.

I felt the love they shared seemed entirely real, and not romanticised at all. Like Jonathan Wright, I felt immensely attached to the characters, I liked them both, and I believed in them. I read the whole thing on a train journey from Edinburgh to Devon. The Facts of Life is a historical fantasy novel by English writer Graham Joyce.It was first published in the United Kingdom in December 2002 by Victor Gollancz Ltd, and in June 2003 in the United States by the Atria Publishing Group. So, bearing all this in mind, I was delighted to discover that from first page to last, I loved it.

The Silent Land by Graham Joyce