Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist Jordan Tannahill's novel The Listeners turns up the volume on faith talk
This interview originally aired on Oct. 23, 2021.
Jordan Tannahill is a playwright, director and author. He has twice won the Governor General's Literary Award for drama: in 2014 for the play Age of Minority and in 2018 for the plays Botticelli in the Fire & Sunday in Sodom. His debut novel, Liminal, won France's 2021 Prix des Jeunes Libraires.
Tannahill's second novel, The Listeners, follows a suburban mother and teacher named Claire Devon. Set up as a memoir, The Listeners is Claire's account of how she becomes part of a disparate group of people who can hear a low hum that has no obvious source or medical cause. Feeling more and more isolated from her family, Claire strikes up a friendship with one of her students who can also hear the hum, and her life soon begins to unravel.
The Listeners was shortlisted for the 2021 Scotiabank Giller Prize.
Tannahill spoke with Shelagh Rogers about digging into a mysterious phenomenon to write The Listeners.
The hum
"I base the sound that's heard in the novel off of people's actual testimonies of what they hear and claim to be 'the hum.' How people have described it is as something like a kind of a low rumble, something akin perhaps to a large truck idling outside of one's home. Some people describe it almost as a physical sensation, more than even a sound that they can hear — it is just a very low-frequency sound, on the verge of human hearing.
"There are thousands of reports around the world of people who do hear a hum. And there have been reports of a hum since about the early 1970s, maybe even late 1960s. But it's not entirely conclusive as to whether this is a single global phenomenon or if it's a series of isolated and localized white-noise issues. The story I did was based on real reports of people suffering from this hum."
The origin of a sound
"People have been tracking this for decades. Scientists have offered up so many different explanations, and some of them are actually quite poetic and lyrical. One of my favourites is there was a French team of geoscientists who theorized that the hum could be ocean waves rolling against the ocean floor and creating vibrations that we don't hear.
"In fact, the first time I heard about this was the one that's been reported in Windsor, Ont., for a number of years. What struck me about reports of this hum was the fact that sometimes only a single person in one household in one family would be able to hear it. They would feel incredibly isolated.
People have been tracking this for decades. Scientists have offered up so many different explanations, and some of them are actually quite poetic and lyrical.
"But it's possible that there are family members of their partner who wouldn't even believe them, and yet they would have very serious symptoms: headaches, nosebleeds and insomnia. I became interested in the ways in which the hum felt almost like this private burden.
"In a way, I explored the idea of the hysterical subject, which is, of course, a gendered trope throughout history — particularly women's illnesses or physical conditions sometimes being dismissed."
Paranoid times
"This story certainly isn't exclusively American — although the ways in which it explores the confluence of media, conspiracy, culture and faith felt particularly vivid in America, certainly during Trump's presidency. Still to this day, the ways in which these things collide ultimately is quite cataclysmic in this story.
Our sense of truth and how we use that as a means of navigating our own lives has been critically disrupted.
"We're all living in very paranoid times in which our sense of what is truth and how we use that as a means of navigating our own lives has been critically disrupted.
"I was interested in the ways in which conspiracy culture has become mainstream in American politics — and ways in which faith has always played a major role in American society. And that felt just like the kind of fertile ground in which to stage the story."
Jordan Tannahill's comments have been edited for length and clarity.
