The Listeners
CBC Books | | Posted: July 14, 2021 7:59 PM | Last Updated: July 7, 2022
Jordan Tannahill
One night, while lying in bed next to her husband, Claire Devon suddenly hears a low hum. This innocuous sound, which no one else in the house can hear, has no obvious source or medical cause, but it begins to upset the balance of Claire's life. When she discovers that one of her students 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 people who also perceive the sound. What starts out as a kind of neighbourhood self-help group gradually transforms into something much more extreme, with far-reaching, devastating consequences.
The Listeners is an electrifying novel that treads the thresholds of faith, conspiracy and mania. Compelling and exhilarating, it forces us to consider how strongly we hold on to what we perceive, and the way different views can tear a family apart. (From HarperCollins)
The Listeners was on the 2021 Scotiabank Giller Prize shortlist.
Scotiabank Giller Prize jury citation: "The Listeners is at once a revery for the sublime, for the innocuous tapestry of sounds that make up the rhythms of our lives — and the pollution of sounds that can tear and devour. It is at once a masterful interrogation of the body, as well as the desperate violence that undergirds our lives in the era of social media, conspiracies, isolation, and environmental degradation. Tannahill writes as both poet and playwright, millennial and philosopher, as one who trains his reader to attune to the frequency of 'the Hum' to experience a rich hinterland beyond our embodied senses, beyond our perceptions of grace or faith. I leave listening, even to the silences, which are always screaming, and posit myself in my cochlea, forever now a conch, flaring and reeling, primordially."
The Listeners is at once a revery for the sublime, for the innocuous tapestry of sounds that make up the rhythms of our lives — and the pollution of sounds that can tear and devour. - 2021 Scotiabank Giller Prize jury
Jordan Tannahill is a playwright, filmmaker, author and theatre director. He has twice won the Governor General's Literary Award for drama: in 2014 for Age of Minority and in 2018 for Botticelli in the Fire & Sunday in Sodom. He is also the author of the novel Liminal.
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Why Jordan Tannahill wrote The Listeners
"It really began with me initially reading about the hum in Windsor and then kind of beginning to extrapolate from there. I imagined a character of a mother and a wife named Claire Devon, who's a teacher and who begins to hear the hum and her family can't hear this hum. Her colleagues at work can't. Her friends can't. How incredibly isolating this is for her.
"And I began thinking very much of this idea of the hysterical subject, this very gendered figure throughout history. A woman's symptoms and ailments have often been disregarded and dismissed as psychosomatic or hysterical or what have you.
I began thinking very much of this idea of the hysterical subject, this very gendered figure throughout history. - Jordan Tannahill
"I think the idea of this person reminded me a little bit of Julianne Moore in Todd Haynes's Safe, who has this inexplicable illness or ailment which burdens her incredibly, but who, despite the good intentions of her family, is not believed.
"I think that was the departure point for this story and how that ostracizes her from her life and drives her into a more extreme trajectory where she's seeking the comfort and companionship of initially a student of hers, who can also hear the hum, and then ultimately strangers. So that's where, for me, it began."
From the book
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 forty-five 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 leading up to the events on Sequoia Crescent.
From The Listeners by Jordan Tannahill published by HarperCollins Copyright © 2021.