The Listeners: Jordan Tannahill

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This innocuous noise begins causing Claire headaches, nosebleeds, insomnia, gradually upsetting the balance of her life, though no obvious source or medical cause can be found. When she discovers that a student of hers can also hear the hum, the two strike up an unlikely and intimate friendship. Finding themselves increasingly isolated from their families and colleagues, they fall in with a disparate group of neighbours who also perceive the sound. What starts as a neighbourhood self-help group gradually transforms into something more extreme and with far-reaching, devastating consequences. There is no predicting how this story will end. It kept me invested and eager to know where it was going and what would happen. The audio performance was phenomenal! The book is written as a book written by Claire in first person. It was a clever way to tell the story and gave it an element of authenticity. I was hoping that was the end of it, but I could tell it was still working on Paul as he lay there, staring up at the ceiling. For such a giant man, he could be like a little boy when he stewed on something. She’s a relatable 21st-century everywoman who loves her daughter, fears organized religion, and hates the patriarchy. Her cleverness should have probably taken her further in life, but she’s happy with the way things are until The Hum so rudely invades her life. There has always been the trend of unlikeable characters in the books I enjoy and this one is no different. I was sympathetic for our main character Claire but she makes several bad decisions along the way that, morally, are hard to root for. There are plenty of side characters who aren't completely detestable but I can't say I liked them either.⁠

It really began with me initially reading about the hum in Windsor and then kind of beginning to extrapolate from there. I imagined a character of a mother and a wife named Claire Devon, who's a teacher and who begins to hear the hum and her family can't hear this hum. Her colleagues at work can't. Her friends can't. How incredibly isolating this is for her. After a death hoax in February, playwright, performance artist and journalist Nina Arsenault speaks candidly about art, aging and mortality". Toronto Star, March 18, 2021. How easy it is to fall out of status with society and with the people who should be best equipped to support you and love you unconditionally. If you do not conform to what is described by society as “normal” you do not get to participate in it. Even though, arguably, all our interactions are performance. If you are out of step you learn what it’s like outside of the dance. Jordan Tannahill's latest novel The Listeners traces one woman's destructive journey in search for truth The Listeners is at once a revery for the sublime, for the innocuous tapestry of sounds that make up the rhythms of our lives — and the pollution of sounds that can tear and devour. It is at once a masterful interrogation of the body, as well as the desperate violence that undergirds our lives in the era of social media, conspiracies, isolation and environmental degradation. Tannahill writes as both poet and playwright, millennial and philosopher, as one who trains his reader to attune to the frequency of 'the Hum' to experience a rich hinterland beyond our embodied senses, beyond our perceptions of grace or faith. I leave listening, even to the silences, which are always screaming, and posit myself in my cochlea, forever now a conch, flaring and reeling, primordially.”Tannahill has been described as "the enfant terrible of Canadian Theatre" by Libération [4] and The Walrus, [5] "one of Canada's most extraordinary artists" by CBC Arts, [6] and "widely celebrated as one of Canada’s most accomplished young playwrights, filmmakers and all-round multidisciplinary artists" by the Toronto Star. [7] In 2019, CBC Arts named Tannahill as one of sixty-nine LGBTQ Canadians, living or deceased, who has shaped the country's history. [8] Early life [ edit ] The truth is that I am a mother, and a wife, and a former high school English teacher who now teaches ESL night classes at the library near my house. I love my family fiercely. My daughter, Ashley, is the most important person in my life. You read about parents disowning their transgender sons, or refusing to speak to their daughters for marrying a Jew, or not marrying a Jew, and I think — well that's just barbarism. Faith is basically a mental illness if it makes you do something so divorced from your natural instincts as a parent. I remember holding Ashley when she was about 45 seconds old, before she had even opened her eyes, when she was just this slimy little mole-thing, nearly a month premature, and I remember thinking I would literally commit murder for this creature. As I held her I imagined all of the joy and pleasure she would feel, all of the pain that I would not and could not protect her from, and it completely overwhelmed me. I imagined the men who would hurt her one day, and I imagined castrating them one by one with my bare hands. All of this before she was a minute old! So no, I have never understood how anyone could ever put any creed or ideology before their love of their child — and yet, this is precisely what Ashley accused me of doing in the year lead- ing up to the events on Sequoia Crescent. Faith is basically a mental illness if it makes you do something so divorced from your natural instincts as a parent. I remain filled to the brim with questions yet, I care not for answers. Claire sees her life return to normal without much consequence. People died but she simply walks home to the husband she treats like rotting trash so that he can tend to her as he has always done. The majority of the characters in this book are spoiled beyond repair & this renders the book banal. Claire’s experience being the outlier in her home where she treats the other two (2) people living there like accessories to her rise to fame, is ridiculous.

In the face of this story, one might ask themselves what the appealing feature of such a dementedly irritating plot might be & I should like to highlight that I came across this book while looking to read stories written by Canadian authors. I have a great appreciation for the bizarre, especially in literature, & therefore felt that this book would be right up my alley. When Claire begins to hear a hum she goes insane, in the literal medical meaning of the word. I was intrigued by the topic & admit to having high hopes for this book. Governor General's Award winner Jordan Tannahill's rainbow connection". National Post. November 18, 2014. Compellingly explores the vexed relationships between the domestic and the political. Enigmatic and provocative, The Listeners is apt to stretch and warp its readers’ own perspectives, as a funhouse mirror for our times.” What I got was a story exploring religion, conspiracy theories and how extreme beliefs can tear apart families and neighbors with devastating and often violent consequences. Jordan Tannahill is a playwright, filmmaker, author and theatre director. He has twice won the Governor General's Literary Award for drama: in 2014 for Age of Minority and in 2018 for Botticelli in the Fire & Sunday in Sodom. He is also the author of the novel Liminal.Happy publication day! I was drawn to this one initially for its trippy cover and it's safe to say the inside matches! The concept of this one is really interesting, it blends faith, conspiracies, cults and mania all into one.⁠ And because this is all first-person narration by Claire after the fact, there is a component that feels noticeably absent: objectivity. The larger context is not provided outside of Claire, save for her group. The Listeners was adapted into an opera for the National Opera of Norway by Missy Mazzoli and Royce Vavrek. It premiered at the Oslo Opera House on September 24 2022. I was lying beside Paul in bed. He was reading the New York Times on his tablet , and I was marking student essays on Twelfth Night. Nonetheless, even with some shortcomings, The Listeners is an engrossing read that deserves recognition among the best Canadian books of the last year. Tags

Tannahill's work in contemporary dance includes choreographing and performing with Christopher House in Marienbad for the Toronto Dance Theatre in 2016; and writing the text for Xenos in 2018, and Outwitting the Devil in 2019, two shows by choreographer Akram Khan, which have toured internationally to venues including Sadler's Wells Theatre, Festival d'Avignon, and the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Now (newspaper) listed both Marienbad and Xenos as Top 10 dance shows of the 2010s decade. [26] I mean, to me, there's something kind of queer about that, I suppose. This libidinal, anarchic energy that the hum begins to represent in Claire's life and the lives of these people who hear it. And by inviting it into her life, it disrupts and rearranges everything. It's definitely an impulse I can relate to.

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There were sounds we could only perceive in their absence and I found it unsettling to realize how much I had managed not to hear. p14 Yet another theory points to the nearly 8m lightning strikes that hit Earth every day. These strikes build up a massive electromagnetic charge which, in turn, causes the air between the surface of the Earth and the ionosphere to resonate – much like the inside of a bottle when one blows across its top. It is easy to picture a place where all the fallout that comes from Claire hearing The Hum would simply never happen. Maybe there are massive power lines going through a town, towing electricity to a city. There Claire is walking into a school, bumps into Kyle. One tells the other that The Hum is especially loud today. One fingers the clouds, coming on rapidly, says that it looks like a storm is coming. Both things are self-evident there. Throughout, Claire herself and a few other characters are reading Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, a purposeful clue to this being a book about a clash of ideas, and also raising questions of how life is experienced via the body and mind (spirit, I think, is the term that Mann uses). Concepts of mystery and wonder are raised but evade any kind of definition or explanation - isn't that their defining essence? A masterful speculative novel exploring the fine lines between faith, conspiracy, and mania in contemporary America.

I do not hear the Hum. But ever since I became aware of its existence seven or eight years ago, after stumbling on a forum for hearers, I have been fascinated by it and, more specifically, by those who hear it. Reading their testimonials, I am reminded of the way some people speak about spiritual revelation – deeply felt experiences, often contested by others, and largely unprovable by empirical evidence. Sometimes, hearers will be the only people in their family or group of friends who hear the Hum. This can be a profoundly isolating experience. From another perspective, this also marks them out as special. And when connected with fellow hearers online, there is a sense that they hold a secret, insider knowledge of which the rest of the world is oblivious. It is this feeling of being part of a select, perhaps maligned or misunderstood group, which believes itself to be in possession of a unique truth, that forms the foundations of both conspiracy theories and religious sects. The conspiracy is what's being done to us....It's only a theory until there's evidence, and the evidence is all around us....p234One night, while lying in bed next to her husband, Claire Devon suddenly hears a low hum. This innocuous sound, which no one else in the house can hear, has no obvious source or medical cause, but it begins to upset the balance of Claire's life. When she discovers that one of her students can also hear the hum, the two strike up an unlikely and intimate friendship. Finding themselves increasingly isolated from their families and colleagues, they fall in with a disparate group of people who also perceive the sound. What starts out as a kind of neighbourhood self-help group gradually transforms into something much more extreme, with far-reaching, devastating consequences. I really loved the premise of this book: Claire Devon, a high school teacher, suddenly starts hearing a low frequency noise one evening. She seems to be the only one who can hear it and her husband Paul and her daughter Ashley think she's just... crazy. She loses her sleep, she loses her concentration, she grows isolated; until she finds out that one of her students, Kyle, can hear 'The Hum' too. Later they find out there are many more people who can hear it and they decide to start meeting regularly. Despite being an undeniable character study at heart, The Listeners excels as a social commentary on the power of beliefs to unite and divide people.