#BlogTour-‘A Small Quiet Dark by Miranda Gold

About The Book

March, 1945. The ravaged face of London will soon be painted with victory, but for Sylvie, the private battle for peace is just beginning. When one of her twins is stillborn, she is faced with a consuming grief for the child she never had a chance to hold. A Small Dark Quiet follows a mother as she struggles to find the courage to rebuild her life and care for an orphan whom she and her husband, Gerald, adopt two years later.
Born in a concentration camp, the orphan’s early years appear punctuated with frail speculations, opening up a haunting space that draws Sylvie to bring him into parallel with the child she lost. When she gives the orphan the stillborn child’s name, this unwittingly entangles him in a grief he will never be able to console. His own name has been erased, his origins blurred. Arthur’s preverbal trauma begins to merge with the loss he carries for Sylvie, released in nightmares and fragments of emerging memories to make his life that of a boy he never knew. He learns all about ‘that other little Arthur’, yearning both to become him and to free himself from his ghost. He can neither fit the shape of the life that has been lost nor grow into the one his adopted father has carved out for him.
As the novel unfolds over the next twenty years, Arthur becomes curious about his Jewish heritage, but fears what this might entail – drawn towards it, it seems he might find a sense of communion and acceptance, but the chorus of persecutory voices he has internalised becomes too overwhelming to bear. He is threatened as a child with being sent back where he belongs but no one can tell him where this is. He wanders as an adult looking for purpose but is unable to find his place. Feeling an imposter both at home and in the city, Arthur’s yearning for that sense of belonging echoes in our own time.
Meeting Lydia seems to offer Arthur the opportunity to recast himself, yet all too soon he is trapped in a repetition of what he was trying to escape. A past he can neither recall nor forget lives on within him even as he strives to forge a life for himself. Survival, though, insists Arthur keeps searching and as he opens himself to the world around him, there are flashes of just how resilient the human heart can be.
Through Sylvie’s unprocessed grief and Arthur’s acute sense of displacement, A Small Dark Quiet explores how the compulsion to fill the empty space death leaves behind ultimately makes the devastating void more acute. Yet however frail, the instinct for empathy and hope persists in this powerful story of loss, migration and the search for belonging.

Welcome to my latest blogtour with Random Things Tours  for ‘A Small, Dark Quiet’ by Miranda Gold.

What a powerful and intense novel this is, bearing witness to the power of memory, loss and grief.

Home alone whilst husband, Gerald is fighting in the Second World War, Sylvie gives birth to twin boys. One , Arthur, is still born and whisked away-she never gets to see him,to hold him or to say goodbye and all her energy and attention is directed by well meaning neighbours and hospital staff towards Henry, the surviving child.

‘A Small, Dark Quiet’, is how she refers to the space inside her where Arthur was, the space in her heart where she imagines him still and tries to rationalise her grief with her imagination. Every time she looks at Henry she is trying to see traces of the child she lost-would they have been identical, can she take any comfort in Henry?

None is to be found and in one of many heartbreaking scenes, the young mother creates a ‘baby’ of moss, twigs and leaves to then bury in the ground as she desperately tries to give Arthur a place in this world as well as in her heart.

The novel goes backwards and forwards between 1965 and 1947, when the twins should have been 2. Gerald has returned home and answering an advert for families to take in survivors of concentration camps, Sylvie brings home a boy sharing the same birthdate as Henry and Arthur.

Her thought processes are that they have a spare life,a spare name, a spare boy shaped hole in their family fabric that could be filled by this child. The boy does not talk until one night he wakes Gerald and Sylvie, screaming. In a telling aside, Gerald wakes Sylvie telling her that it is she who is screaming. Sylvie finds him in the airing cupboard and begins to tell him stories about the Arthur who never was.

In 1965, Sylvie is on some form of medication-there are references to her tablets, her pills-and she is clearly someone who has had such trauma from the birth that she has never recovered. She falls, she drops things, she has little sense of danger and needs careful monitoring.

In contrast, Gerald is short, snappy, bullying and hectoring towards his 2 sons. It’s as though the loss of Arthur in conjunction with his time as a soldier have broken him and his response is to demand more of Henry and Arthur.

Arthur was only 2 when he was given to this new family and as he gets older he finds himself drawn to explore his Jewish heritage which enrages Gerald. It is  as though he feels that it’s a rejection of all they have done for him by returning to a time that to Gerald’s mind, Arthur should not remember.

But Arthur does remember, enough to make him search for a place of belonging-to become the person he hopes to be not a mingling of a child who never existed, carrying the weight of expectation which he could never hope to fulfil.

It seems very fitting to be reading this on The International Day of Commemoration of the Holocaust at a time where, there are, inexplicably , those who feel that they can deny that this ever happened. That they have the freedom to express such opinions because of the sacrifices of millions of lives is such a bitter pill to swallow.

I cannot express how grateful I am to Anne Cater and Unbound for this copy of ‘A Small Dark Quiet’, I learnt so much and this is the point-without novels and ceremonies and raising awareness of what happened in the past and is still happening now around the world, we are doomed to carry on repeating history and endlessly taking lives. The trauma that these survivors have experienced and yet they are still willing and able to discuss it, takes such great courage -we need to continue to stand with them, remember what happened and listen.

Beautiful, elegant, sparse and heartrending, ‘A Small Dark Quiet’ is lyrical and constructed with a pure joy for the words that sing from every page. It is an ultimately uplifting and powerful read that I would absolutely recommend.

About The Author

Concert pianist in a parallel universe, novelist in this, Miranda Gold is a woman whose curiosity about the instinct in us all to find and tell stories qualifies her to do nothing but build worlds out of words.
Miranda’s first love was theatre and advises anyone after a dose of laughter in dark (along with a ferocious lesson in subtext) to look no further than the cheese sandwich in Pinter’s The Homecoming. No less inspiring were the boisterous five year olds she taught drama to and the youth groups she supported to workshop and stage their scripts. Both poetry and its twin, music, have been fundamental in her process as a writer and her hope is that the novel can tap into some of their magic to unleash the immediacy and visceral power of language – qualities that keep the reader on the page as well as turning it. Gatsby, To the Lighthouse and The Ballad of the Sad Café are books she will always come back to, always finding another door left ajar. Having the opportunity to mentor prisoners at Pentonville reaffirmed for her the connections that can be made when we find a narrative and a shape that can hold experience. There have been fleeting fantasies of becoming a Flamenco dancer, but sadly she has the coordination of an inebriated jelly fish.
Her first novel, Starlings, published by Karnac (2016) reaches back through three generations to explore how the impact of untold stories ricochets down the years. In her review for The Tablet, Sue Gaisford described Starlings as “a strange, sad, original and rather brilliant first novel, illumined with flashes of glorious writing and profound insight, particularly into the ways in which we attempt to reinvent ourselves.” Before turning her focus to fiction, Miranda attended the Soho Course for young writers where her play, Lucky Deck, was selected for development and performance.