Review: Silent Hall

Silent Hall by N.S. Dolkart
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I found my way to this book because I very much enjoyed Noah Beit-Aharon’s essay at Prosen People about how he came to write it as an experiment in what Jewish fantasy literature might look like. That’s an articulate essay, and it asks some of my own questions from some of my own premises. Yes as Dolkart (aka Beit-Aharon) puts it, there is a strong tradition of Jewish fantasy – think of I.B. Singer or Cynthia Ozick or Steve Stern – but there is less of a tradition of Jewish “high fantasy.” As Tolkien gave that to us, there is a Christian topos woven into the DNA. So, nu, is it possible to do it Jewish style?

(As an aside, I think there are some who have tried, most successfully Lev Grossman, whose Magicians series strikes me as an attitudinally perfect Jewish teenager’s response to the saccharine Christianity of the Narnia books.)

(As a further aside, I think there are a lot of “high fantasy” forebears – like Fritz Lieber and E.R. Eddison – who give us models of the genre without the powerful Tolkien effect. I also think that the current ‘dungeon master’ of the genre, George R.R. Martin, does a fine job of altering the Christian dualism of the form. Still, the question is a good one and worth pursuing.)

And yet, as much as I wanted to like this, I can’t. I’m afraid I can’t even finish it.

Beit-Aharon seems a fine nonfiction stylist, but I’m afraid this simply doesn’t work. The prose here is just too choppy, too awkward in its structure and tone to conduct the experiment with anything like the competence it demands.

I’ll begin with my concerns about the chapters themselves. Each of these is strikingly short – we get 8-9 pages to introduce a character, then we move onto the next. I get that this is a coming together, an origin story for our merry band, but there isn’t enough character development. It’s quantity standing in for quality.

Then, he handles the change in perspective badly. It does make sense that, say, Bandu would lack the vocabulary to name something the others know at a glance, but before long it gets clumsy. We’re moving quickly through the story, but slowly through the exposition. We too often see the same instant through different eyes. In the end, without the depth we need from fully characters, they’re all coming from the same place anyway.

And, finally, there’s a deep problem with tone. For a novel with this sort of ambition, it’s awfully fairy-tale like in its voice. We get broad strokes and dependence on an implicit sense of childhood’s mystery and danger. I can see something like that working for a novel that merely suggests the dark elements it confronts, but then it gets complicated by the devastation described: an entire island’s population dies of a god’s curse, an old woman falls overboard and drowns, men get torn to pieces by a wild boar, and bodies rot in the hot sun. Even more clumsy, we get theological/magical speculation, but it comes to us like something taught to fifth-graders.

In other words, the technique just isn’t here. I suspect I’d enjoy meeting this author very much, and I’d love to trade notes on something we both want to accomplish. This feels too much like something he wrote as a young man, though, or even as an adolescent, to be anything like the success we’d both want to see.

It pains me to say it, but I can’t recommend this at all.


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