The Listeners: Jordan Tannahill

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In my head, in the car sometimes. I'm sure many people see me as a villain in this story, but I try not to see myself as that either.

This innocuous noise begins causing Claire headaches, nosebleeds, insomnia, gradually upsetting the balance of her life, though no obvious source or medical cause can be found. When she discovers that a student of hers can also hear the hum, the two strike up an unlikely and intimate friendship. Finding themselves increasingly isolated from their families and colleagues, they fall in with a disparate group of neighbours who also perceive the sound. What starts as a neighbourhood self-help group gradually transforms into something more extreme and with far-reaching, devastating consequences.

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I studied Paul's face, wondering if this was all a set-up for one of his laboured jokes. He then told me that ever since his father died in the fall, he had found himself thinking about faith. The fact that we do have a society in which roughly one half of the population seem to be living in one reality and the other half population seems to be living in another totally alternative reality, I think that seems to be one of the great problems of our current political moment. So how do we create a bridge of logic and empathy between that chasm, where we're not just on one side of that and Claire is on the other?

The truth is that I am a mother, and a wife, and a former high school English teacher who now teaches ESL night classes at the library near my house. I love my family fiercely. My daughter, Ashley, is the most important person in my life. You read about parents disowning their transgender sons, or refusing to speak to their daughters for marrying a Jew, or not marrying a Jew, and I think — well that's just barbarism. Faith is basically a mental illness if it makes you do something so divorced from your natural instincts as a parent. I remember holding Ashley when she was about 45 seconds old, before she had even opened her eyes, when she was just this slimy little mole-thing, nearly a month premature, and I remember thinking I would literally commit murder for this creature. As I held her I imagined all of the joy and pleasure she would feel, all of the pain that I would not and could not protect her from, and it completely overwhelmed me. I imagined the men who would hurt her one day, and I imagined castrating them one by one with my bare hands. All of this before she was a minute old! So no, I have never understood how anyone could ever put any creed or ideology before their love of their child — and yet, this is precisely what Ashley accused me of doing in the year lead- ing up to the events on Sequoia Crescent. Faith is basically a mental illness if it makes you do something so divorced from your natural instincts as a parent. She’s a relatable 21st-century everywoman who loves her daughter, fears organized religion, and hates the patriarchy. Her cleverness should have probably taken her further in life, but she’s happy with the way things are until The Hum so rudely invades her life.The Listeners is on the shortlist for the 2021 Scotiabank Giller Prize. The winner will be announced on Nov. 8, 2021.

Some parts I found poorly written; the dialogues were incredibly irritating, unclear, too long. The first meeting of the group took too much of the book and I found myself speed-reading these long discussions. Towards the end of the book - without revealing what happens - I found myself cringing when the group met. Jordan Tannahill’s Theatre of the Unimpressed is essential reading for anybody interested in contemporary theatre". The Globe and Mail, June 12, 2015. The intersections Tannahill’s The Listeners, a Giller Prize longlisted book, occupies are almost overwhelming when you stop and consider its ingrained themes.Thank you to Netgalley, the author and HarperCollins Canada for an e-copy. I am providing my honest review. This will be released in the latter part of August 2021. I remain filled to the brim with questions yet, I care not for answers. Claire sees her life return to normal without much consequence. People died but she simply walks home to the husband she treats like rotting trash so that he can tend to her as he has always done. The majority of the characters in this book are spoiled beyond repair & this renders the book banal. Claire’s experience being the outlier in her home where she treats the other two (2) people living there like accessories to her rise to fame, is ridiculous. The Listeners explores the seduction of the wild and unknowable, the human search for the transcendent, the rise of conspiracy culture in the West, and the desire for community and connection in our increasingly polarised times.