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Say nothing. Not a word to anyone. Whatever you see. Whatever you hear. Do you understand? Say nothing. Ever.
Tip-tap. Like cracking a walnut.
On the night of 10 August 1792 the Tuileries palace was stormed by revolutionaries, Louis XVI fled, and the French monarchy came to an effective end. That same night, an eleven-year-old boy, Charles, whose surname is in dispute, witnessed a terrible crime. It was so horrific that he took absolutely literally the injunction to say nothing, not ever, about it. He would not speak again.
He did, however, have the presence of mind to flee the scene and run though the streets of Paris, where riotous mobs were on a rampage, to the Left Bank, where he sought refuge with his former nanny. In time, he found himself in the house of the Count de Quillon and ultimately in England, where the count, his associate, M. De Fournier, and a certain Dr Gohlis have taken refuge from the Revolution. Through all this, Charles is treated with at best a blank indifference, at worst deliberate cruelty designed to improve his character. He starts wetting the bed. He utters not a single word.
Charles, it transpires, is the child of Augusta Savill, estranged wife of Edward Savill. She had been living in Paris, having eloped there with her German lover. We are told that she died on that August night. Since Savill and Augusta were still married at the time of her death, Charles is legally if not biologically Edward's son. But Augusta's uncle, Mr Rampton, wants custody of the boy, evidently with an eye to making him his heir. There are, of course, complications. The Count de Quillon, for example, believes he is Charles' father and wants to have him. Undetermined interests wish the boy no good and he is made to disappear, snatched and then held captive in frightening conditions.
We first met Edward Savill in THE SCENT OF DEATH (2013) in New York City, at the time of another revolution, where he had gone on a commission from the same Mr Rampton, his patron. His time in America had proved enlightening, if terrifying, and he has apparently been spending the intervening ten years quietly in London, attending to business and taking care of his daughter, Lizzie. But now, he finds himself drawn into the problem of Charles, a problem far more complicated and obscure than who gets custody of the child. Savill is an unusual choice of "detective" - in his previous appearance he was out of his depth in New York, understanding not enough about the colony to get quite what is going on. This time around, an abscessed molar, brutal dentistry, infection, and even possible poisoning keep him out of the way for much of the action.
Considering the passion with which the various parties announce their determination to gain control of Charles, they treat the boy himself heartlessly. Here Taylor takes the opportunity to provide a discreet but informative sketch of Enlightenment theories of childhood as well as of attitudes toward the mute. Whereas today Charles would be viewed as suffering from PTSD, then he was generally seen as either stupid or stubborn. Taylor adopts an interesting use of tense to differentiate between those sections of the book that focus narrowly on Charles and what happens to him and those that describe the adults and their doings. The adults' story is told conventionally in the past tense by an omniscient observer. Charles, on the other hand, exists solely in the present tense, perhaps because his past is so harrowing that he cannot bear to remember it and his future so clouded that he can have no faith that he will ever have one.
Though the period is wrong, THE SILENT BOY has something Dickensian about it. Not the marvellous grotesques and extravagant eccentrics, of course, but we engage with Charles as we do with Oliver Twist and David Copperfield. Seeing him with modern eyes, we admire his strength of will, his determination to preserve himself at almost any cost, while those around him, shut off from all communication by his refusal to speak, write, draw, or even laugh, try to break his will through punishment, beatings, indifference, or grossly hideous threats.
At this point in his career, Taylor has produced an extraordinary body of historical fiction. His work is unusual in that he has not confined himself to a particular period. While he clearly has a fondness for the late 18th century (THE ANATOMY OF GHOSTS, THE SCENT OF DEATH, THE SILENT BOY), he has also set books in the late Regency (THE AMERICAN BOY) and 1930s London, in BLEEDING HEART SQUARE. Even the Lydmouth novels, set in 1950s provincial Britain, are historical as documentation of the relatively recent past, written when that time was largely overlooked in fiction.
If the tag "historical novel" make you think of ripped bodices and heaving bosoms, think again. THE SILENT BOY is a brilliant addition to Taylor's already distinguished body of work. Whatever the time frame he chooses to explore, Taylor never fails to provide a rich, suspenseful, beautifully written, and thoroughly engrossing act of historical imagination.
§ Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, November 2014
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