Flying in Silence

Focussing on a young boy with an English mother and a French father, neither of whom speaks the other's language, Flying in Silence is a rite-of-passage novel from the point of view of someone caught between linguistic worlds. A young boy's childhood and adolescence is remembered from the distance of Australia, but lived through the streets and stories of Montreal. For the young narrator, it is a world of quiet violences and peculiar confusions. At the dinner table, a strange mixture of French and English or Franglais would be spoken. The mother would ask a question in English, the father would answer in French, and their son would flutter between them. ('Pass le sel. Veux-tu some water?') Unilingual friends always felt somewhat exhausted when they visited. They blinked in confusion as familiar phrases slipped suddenly out of their grasp, so that they'd reach for the salt shaker, but then weren't sure what to do with it, or they'd accept a glass of water not realizing they'd asked for it. At times comic, always rich in detail and redolent with memory, Turcotte suffuses his work with irrepressible longing though is ability to combine humour with a visceral response.