<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n The Rest is Silence <\/p>\n Many people fantasize about withdrawing from modern society by escaping back to nature, away from the chaos of industry and technology. Sometimes the place we imagine we could reach is a place we\u2019ve been before – a place we found when we were children, before we knew our lives were complicated. In The Rest is Silence, a man escapes his past by retreating into the backwoods of Nova Scotia, where he remembers camping with his father as a boy. He builds a cabin and farms his land, hoping to reach back to his childhood and come to terms with his past by starting something new. This is a story about a journey, but it\u2019s also a love story, and a family drama, with elements of science fiction and the narrative elegance of mythology. The Rest is Silence is a thoughtful and considerate story, engaging and intriguing at every level. Scott Fotheringham\u2019s first novel is a gem – equal parts poetic meditation and page-turner.<\/p>\n The Rest is Silence begins with a confession of absence: \u201cThis is what I\u2019ve lost\u201d. Though the novel picks up in the middle of a personal journey – the narrator\u2019s lived manifesto – it soon gathers speed and becomes a hybrid of exciting plot twists and gorgeous prose. Fotheringham avoids the obvious routes this story could take and instead turns it into something fresh and poignant, without leaning on any cliches too heavily. Though the novel acknowledges traditional boundaries, and the way they are traditionally broken, it instead opts to observe them, re-contextualize them, and then blur them in time and theme and place. In this and other aspects there is definitely an element of familiarity to The Rest is Silence – maybe the exciting and deeply pleasurable style of disjointed storytelling has taken root as a Canadian form, or maybe it\u2019s just that the idea of reconstructing our origins, our genes, and our parents, is so fundamental that it can\u2019t help but resonate. Despite its familiarity though, the novel has nice momentum and doesn\u2019t dwell. Fotheringham has the rare skill of great timing: he gives each episode in the novel just enough time before moving on, introducing a new angle. So, despite its luxurious style, the novel doesn\u2019t dwell or sulk – every page offers something new to add to the human study.<\/p>\n This dual identity, mystery-meditation, action-observation hybridity is at the backbone of the story in The Rest is Silence: Fotheringham and his protagonist are both gently obsessed with supposed binaries, art-science, nature-society, parent-child, but neither of them falls into the trap of preaching or coming to conclusions. Fotheringham gives the intelligent, thoughtful reader credit and in the tradition of great Canadian narrative, he leaves much of what he put into the novel go unsaid. Because of this, you want to pick it up again as soon as you put it down, go back, revisit and read with the benefit of hindsight, not unlike the man in the woods.<\/p>\n The novel certainly has something to say about human abuse of the natural world, but the thesis is tucked into a compelling and endless exploration of relationships and affection, ambition and loss. Fotheringham doesn\u2019t preach, and he doesn\u2019t deflect: he simply allows the novel to be honest about not having any answer other than a kind of fraught plea that we try to love what we have and remember what we\u2019ve lost. Certainly, one could read The Rest is Silence for its messages, or for its ideology, but it\u2019s not necessary. The allusions are more delicate than those of Margaret Atwood, whom the novel is definitely, wonderfully, indebted to. The dystopia Fotheringham imagines is also more contemporary that most, in that it\u2019s more like a dystopian world where we\u2019ve simply recognized the symptoms of a dying planet, rather than denied them. Amazingly, The Rest is Silence is pretty optimistic about our chances – maybe not our chances of survival as we are, but our chances of adapting to the social, genetic, technological, geographical, of which we are both the cause and effect. So, while The Rest is Silence isn\u2019t exactly a light summer read, it is a very enjoyable and satisfying experience: it\u2019s thought provoking, and challenges the reader with introspection. That being said, Fotheringham\u2019s touch is light enough that the novel is highly readable, and compelling on all the levels that make up a good book.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Fiction Review The Rest is Silence by Scott Fotheringham Fredericton, NB: Goose Lane, 2012 322pp, $29.95 Many people fantasize about withdrawing from modern society by escaping back to nature, away from the chaos of industry and technology. Sometimes the place we imagine we could reach is a place […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":800,"parent":93,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-122","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/122","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=122"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/122\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":670,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/122\/revisions\/670"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/93"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/800"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n<\/em>by Scott Fotheringham
\nFredericton, NB: Goose Lane, 2012
\n322pp, $29.95<\/p>\n