'Silence () n. 1. complete absence of sound. 2. the fact or state of abstaining from speech. v. 1. make silent. 2. (silenced) fitted with a silencer.’

Jackie Harris, prison counsellor and ex-drag king, kills her lover's rapist in what she insists is self-defence. A literary novel with changing narrators, strong agendas and intertextual sequences, Silence is an examination of sexual violence and its repercussions. It questions the right of the media to scrutinise and pronounce judgement on a person’s life choices.

‘Silence’ is the story of prison councillor and ‘ex-drag king’ Jackie, who ends up in prison herself after killing her lesbian lover’s rapist. Not an uninteresting plot at first glance, however the event around which the novel purports to revolve is preceded by an almost torturously slow build up which itself exposes many of the books other flaws.

The writing tries too hard to be edgy, and ends up instead being obvious and self-important. The novel attempts to deal with homosexual prejudice in a series of cringe-inducing ways. A heterosexual female character is referred to condescendingly as “the straight”, and the writer often expresses pity for straight women who are all apparently trapped in oppressive heterosexual domesticity. The novel as a whole suffers artistically as a result of this outdated chip on the writer’s shoulder.

The lesbian characters are unsympathetic and two-dimensional. The experiments with narrative form are sometimes appropriate, but often clumsy, such as the diversions into internet chat-room conversations which do nothing to enhance either the characters or the plot. The writer is obviously trying to say something insightful and interesting about what it is like to be gay, with all the personal and social complications that that involves. However, the gay characters themselves have almost no personality or life outside of their sexuality, which makes for highly unrealistic and tiresome reading.

A major problem Josie Henley-Einion is that there are novelists today writing lesbian-centred literature that creates complex, rounded gay characters and tells the stories of lesbian life with poignancy, variety and style. If this is what you are looking for from a gay novel, I suggest you give this one a miss and pick up anything by Sarah Waters instead.

Silence is published by Legend Press and is released tomorrow, 26th July   www.legendpress.co.uk

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