His restraint in the use of flashbacks is also appreciated by this reader. Joyce’s prose is elegant but never ostentatious and key motifs are reintroduced at significant moments in often powerful ways. While there are moments in the first third of the novel where the story seems to meander a little, Joyce dripfeeds enough small but significant moments of revelation to keep the plot from stalling. The Silent Land’s determined focus on this central relationship could, in lesser hands, have led to a story too loosely structured, too devoid of tension to be interesting. This is even true of Jake’s last act in the novel which seems to be a betrayal but turns out to be something much more selfless. Ultimately that love is not so much defined by physical or emotional intimacy (although there’s a lot of both) but more by their commitment to each other’s welfare. They disagree, they bicker, they keep secrets from one another, but their love towards one another is never in doubt. Zoe and Jake are likeable characters and Joyce does a good job giving them their own distinct voices.

Rather, it provides the blank canvas on which Joyce paints a compelling examination of what it means to be, well, together. While there remains an element of mystery about their circumstances right up until the last chapter, that mystery is not really the primary focus of the novel. As the novel progresses, the true nature of the couple’s situation becomes increasingly obvious to the reader and, eventually, to Zoe and Jake themselves. The pair manage to free themselves only to find that their village is deserted. The Silent Land appears, at first, to be about a young married couple, Zoe and Jake, who are on a skiing holiday in the French Pyrenees and are caught up in an avalanche. Like Jonathan Carroll, his work often inhabits the grey, difficult to define hinterland where fantasy, horror and contemporary fiction meet and mingle. I’ve liked Joyce ever since I read The Tooth Fairy, a criminally neglected coming-of-age novel that takes the tooth fairy myth and does something disturbing, magical and ultimately life-affirming with it. Published in 2011, three years before his untimely death in September of last year, it is a mature, contemplative work, which takes a simple premise and, through a compelling mix of deft plotting and a slow accumulation of detail, turns it into something profound and moving. The Silent Land is one of the late Graham Joyce’s last novels.

And life, love and death, too, obviously… Some of my colleagues are off skiing with their students at the moment, actually, so it seems entirely appropriate that I look at a novel by one of my favourite authors which deals with skiing.

The Silent Land by Graham Joyce