Chilled to the core

Rosamund Lupton's own hearing loss fuelled her insight into her character's situation. Photo / Supplied

Rosamund Lupton’s new novel explores a deaf child’s world in a thriller about a desperate struggle to find a missing husband in an icy wilderness, she tells Stephen Jewell.

"I suppose it is like the polar opposite." Meeting Rosamund Lupton at a London hotel to talk about her new novel, The Quality Of Silence, on the hottest day of the British summer so far, you couldn't get a greater contrast of climates. With temperatures averaging minus 50C and dropping as low as minus 60C, the 50-year-old's beguiling third book is set in Alaska, at the height of the brutal Arctic winter.

"It's a very stark environment," says Lupton, who was drawn to the idea after seeing a photo of a snow fox that could turn its fur white to match its frosty surroundings. "I started reading about Alaska, which is the most fascinating place. It's somewhere where the sun is out at midnight in summer but in winter it doesn't rise for two months in the north."

Mostly a two-hander, the book centres around Yasmin, an English visitor, who along with her deaf daughter, Ruby, embarks upon an increasingly desperate journey across Alaska's treacherous terrain to find her missing husband, Matt, a documentary film-maker presumed to have died in a devastating fire at a remote settlement.

"They become very isolated," says Lupton. "There are no houses, so they're completely on their own. There's something quite mythic but also disorienting about a landscape that is covered in snow and is very dark with very few landmarks, so you don't even have any sort of diurnal rhythm."

As part of her research, Lupton travelled to Alaska, where, like her characters, she was caught up in a huge snowstorm, which hampered her efforts to travel to its outlying regions. "I hadn't realised before I went that it was such a frontier place. It was only when I was there that I realised that Russia is only 80km away from the north coast of Alaska. There's a military base nearby, so there is an undercurrent of tension and threat you really have to be there to feel."

While there, Lupton spoke to truck drivers and other local residents. "I asked one of them if it was frightening to drive on the roads, and he said he found it very beautiful. I also thought the roads would be clear and the cars would all have chains on them, but that wasn't the case. It was really icy and there were overturned trucks scattered everywhere. It was very strange."

Worried that Ruby's deafness could lead to her being distanced from so-called mainstream society, the harsh conditions provide Yasmin with some valuable insight into how her daughter perceives the world. Lupton herself lost all hearing in her right ear at the age of 9. "There are a few things I can relate to, such as not being able to orientate yourself. For me, all sound happens to my left. I wouldn't know if a car was speeding up on my other side or if someone called my name, so I was interested in the kind of situation where a deaf child couldn't place themselves in the world around them."

After long insisting she should speak using her mouth, rather than sign, it eventually dawns on Yasmin that Ruby is part of a flourishing network with its own distinct way of conversing. "I talked to a lot of deaf people, and many of them had some really terrible experiences before they discovered the Deaf Community," she says. "It's a very vibrant and exciting place to be, so if a child chooses to go to a school for the deaf, and chooses to be part of that culture, that's a positive choice. Until now, her mother has seen it as a negative move as she's fearful Ruby will be rejected."

Lupton cites the example of Gallaudet University for the deaf and hard of hearing in Washington DC. "There are ways of being that are inclusive when you're deaf, especially when you're like Ruby, who is profoundly deaf, so hearing aids won't work."

Joking that "it would be fab if we could just sign to someone across the room", Lupton believes signing should become a part of everyday life for us all. "It has its own grammar and syntax, and it's recognised as a language in its own right. When I was writing the book, I kept wanting to sign to somebody because I have the British sign language app on my phone, which gives you the sign for whatever you want to say."

Intriguingly, Ruby finds solace online and particularly with social media sites such as Twitter, which enhance her ability to communicate with others. "We can write so much nowadays with stuff like texts, emails, Facebook and blogs, so a child who is deaf now has so many different options," says Lupton. "She can be as loud and fluent as a speaking child, and as the novel was written, I could really explore her world, which is the part of the book I enjoyed writing the most."

Though The Quality Of Silence has yet to be put forward for cinematic adaptation, Lupton's 2010 debut, Sister, could soon be heading to the big screen. Optioned by Studio Canal, it will hopefully star Emily Blunt as a literary agent who attempts to discover whether her recently deceased, younger sister was murdered. But though both books revolve around a search to discover the true fate of someone very close to the main protagonist, Lupton insists The Quality Of Silence is a very different kind of story.

"Love as a motivator is probably true of both, as it pushes people to do extraordinary things. But otherwise Sister was set in England in a very confined space, whereas Alaska is so vast. And in Sister, she quickly knows her sister is dead, then she tries to find out what happened. It's much more of a detective story, while

The Quality Of Silence

is more about the characters in jeopardy, and 'will they find the husband?'"

The Quality of Silence (Little, Brown $37.99) is out now.

- Canvas