By Oisin McGann
Amina Mir is working her summer as an intern at The Chronicle thanks to some string-pulling by her famous-war-correspondent mother. But Amina is ambitious. She doesn’t want to live in the shadow of her mother, she wants to make a name for herself as a journalist and she wants to do it now so she’s less than enthusiastic when she’s asked to interview Ivor McMorris, a veteran of the ongoing Sinnostan war, invalided out because he lost an eye in a roadside bombing.
But Ivor’s story is strange, he can remember every detail of everything that happened to him immediately during and after the bombing; people, places, dates, even times of every event until he was discharged. The problem is he doesn’t think that what he remembers is what actually happened. He believes these memories were planted in his head in order to make him forget what really happened and he wants to get to the bottom of it. He’s also convinced that faceless government spies are watching him…..
Although skeptical, Ivor’s story strikes a chord with Amina and, smelling her big-break story, she decides to do a little investigating on her own as The Chronicle wants to play down any notion of a government conspiracy. Into the mix comes the gloriously named Chi Sandwith, serious hacker and uber-conspiracy theorist who knows a little about Ivor and his story, knows a lot about government cover-ups and is determined to find out the truth about the war in Sinnostan – and he can do it with the help of these two – as long as all three of them can stay alive long enough to tell the world what they know.
Strangled Silence is a gripping, and well-paced book that, while ostensibly written for the young adult market, has appeal for all people of all ages and riffs brilliantly on very contemporary themes. Where there is war, there is propaganda, and in this hi-tech age there is also an all-pervasive media presence, spoon-feeding a gullible public the kind of war stories that the government want them to hear – all is well, we will protect you – and all the while these stories perpetuate the war by breeding fear and compliance into the population. Add to this constant CCTV surveillance, erosion of privacy and violation of civil liberties in the name of ‘peace’ and this novel presents a very contemporary landscape upon which to dwell.
But it’s not a finger-pointing, fist-waving book. At it’s heart is a great story played out by a rich selection of nicely realised and well rounded characters, each with their own agenda but well matched as a team. The dialogue crackles along nicely and there is a neat sub-plot involving Amina’s brother and a military training program at his school that plays nicely into the main story at the end.
In the wake of recent events in Iraq and Afghanistan and the questions in some quarters about why and how we came to be involved in them, the issues raised in Strangled Silence are a whole lot darker and more complex than the average teenage genre fair and I applaud the author for going there. And while there is brainwashing and hacking and mad conspiracy theories, nothing is really what it seems and there is no neatly wrapped and packaged ending because, as Oisin will tell you himself, life isn’t like that.
Strangled Silence starts out well and maintains a kinetic energy that keeps going right to the last page. It’s quick and clever and presents its ideas in a no-nonsense way that, hopefully, will rouse the current crop of adolescent readers to question what goes on around them in a way that, sadly, most adults do not.
Strangled Silence is published by Corgi and is available from Amazon