https://medium.com/@frasersimons/7819e3a99424?sk=ee6c26f043f180b7fc2db882342ea9e8

The intersections Tannahill’s The Listeners, a Giller Prize longlisted book, occupies are almost overwhelming when you stop and consider its ingrained themes.

Powerfully, the novel sets itself up as a memoir of a woman who is retrospectively trying to arrange the moments of her life that turned into a rampant cascade that swept her away from what was her “normal”. There are remarks situated outside of her narrative that reference fictional events. Disclaimers or context that work to give the reader an added sense of suspense and unease simply because it implies with its framing that this is reality.

In a way it is.

Claire Devon is not weak-minded or willed. She, in many ways, holds a leadership position in almost every dynamic she encounters in her town. She’s a teacher who cares. A mentor when needed. Someone who stands up to bullshit rhetoric that is little more than stereotyping and misogyny. But she’s also got an element of everydayness that permeates her life like a nervous tick. Unbidden and unwelcome in an otherwise curated, mostly happy existence is this malaise that she deals with. Nothing is perfect.

But without rhyme or reason, one random evening, she begins to hear the sound of a low hum that throws off her equilibrium. Her tick is now real.

When she discovers one of her students, Kyle, also hears The Hum, the two form a camaraderie that feels beyond friendship (and any other categorization) — and the fiction adopts detective-like undertones.

They chart the town in search of a sound no one, ostensibly, can hear but them. And this obsession, as it becomes, is a catalyst for Claire’s life to morph into a completely different vessel. The shape of which her friends and her husband and daughter cannot make sense of, and so shun her.

Alone together, Claire and Kyle discover a group of people in town who also hear The Hum, and they begin in earnest (and fervor) to tackle this mystery. The interesting thing about this is Claire’s shame rubs off on the reader. When she feels seen, the reader does. The impact of finding an in-group for something so strangely marginalized simultaneously ramps up the suspense — as each group member seems to have a different theory ranging from scientific, or perhaps pseudo-scientific, to conspiracy theories and spirituality.

Claire, meanwhile, is not sleeping.

She tows a line where she is vulnerable and completely contrary to her former self as established, but also more supported and loved; surrounded by people who hear The Hum and believe her unequivocally. Is it healthy? Is it dangerous?

At this point, the book can be examined almost like a prism. You can easily see a particular reading of what occurs only so far until it elicits other thoughts which then collide with one another. You can choose to believe Claire. Or not. Both roads set you down alternate readings. If you do believe her, you then need to pick up the same theories Claire does and twist them about in the hunt for a connection you can label as “correct” or “right”.

It is impossible not to make the connection between her beliefs and others. What is The Hum compared to Him; God, of any stripe or color or flavor?

Perhaps the most horrific thing in this novel is it pointing to how we treat people outside of our socialization — especially clever here because there are no existing (moral or political or otherwise) associations with people who hear The Hum, as with other marginalized identities that our socialization has prompted us to sort already.

The reaction to Claire by her loved ones is similar to people being confronted with anything they don’t understand.

At one point even Claire describes her meeting the others as something similar. It’s as though she lived in one room her whole life and then discovered a door that led to another room. But it’s black and cavernous and terrifying. But she needs to know what is in the other room. Yet the effects on Claire are discernable and troubling. Are they caused by The Hum itself, not sleeping, mental health, being ostracized? What is the relationship between these things, if any?

And because this is all first-person narration by Claire after the fact, there is a component that feels noticeably absent: objectivity. The larger context is not provided outside of Claire, save for her group.

This is where The Listeners really shines.

Passages detailing the dynamics between the characters in their AA-esk meetings are so believable and pungent and tangible that it reaches into that liminal space some readers know and yearn for. Where these granular qualities imbued in a scene transcend; the reader entering a hyper-reality of their own experiences and thoughts and interactions. The text becoming a universal shorthand or bite-sized truth that briefly encapsulates the complexity of people into a consumable form for the reader.

It’s a rare gift hopefully every reader has received.

The suspense that underlies these really beautiful moments between people who share something no one else understands underscores the unique quality this book evokes.

How easy it is to fall out of status with society and with the people who should be best equipped to support you and love you unconditionally. If you do not conform to what is described by society as “normal” you do not get to participate in it. Even though, arguably, all our interactions are performance. If you are out of step you learn what it’s like outside of the dance.

In the time of COVID, this feels particularly prescient and compelling. The Listeners made me think a lot about society and how we interact with one another. About beliefs and their power. About the scope of knowledge, we currently take for granted but continually revise across our lifetimes.
It made me feel really angry about how we treat each other. What we consider good and bad and nourishing or vile.

It is easy to picture a place where all the fallout that comes from Claire hearing The Hum would simply never happen. Maybe there are massive power lines going through a town, towing electricity to a city. There Claire is walking into a school, bumps into Kyle. One tells the other that The Hum is especially loud today. One fingers the clouds, coming on rapidly, says that it looks like a storm is coming. Both things are self-evident there.

Both are true.