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The Silence is a mysterious title, deliberately so, hinting at its genre. It’s the kind of title that asks the reader to figure out what it means, but at the same time it’s not so obscure that it can’t be guessed at. I think it hints at the kinds of secrets that are hidden in plain sight, that remain secret because they are too shameful to speak of, that require an unspoken complicity. Which is precisely what The Silence is about: a woman goes missing and it takes 30 years for anyone to report it, or to talk about what happened.
When I was writing, I had in mind The Great Silence as a potential title, which comes from a phrase used by the anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner to describe the way Aboriginal history was obscured by white Australian historians. My agent wasn’t keen on it at the time, and when the novel was submitted to publishers we used the working title Blind Spot. Nobody liked it much, and throughout the editing process we kicked around dozens of ideas for a new title, but we couldn’t reach a consensus. We really wanted a title that everyone loved, so it could have the same title in the UK, Australia and the U.S.
It was getting a bit desperate as we reached the final editing stage without a title, and I thought I was going to have to accept a mediocre title that nobody loved. I looked back through my list of working titles and found The Great Silence. I was sitting at a bus stop emailing my editors and agent, and...[read on]
Q&A with Susan Allott.
--Marshal Zeringue
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