Review - A Granite Silence by Nina Allan

A Granite Silence

Nina Allan
Riverrun, 10 April 2025
Available as: HB, 352pp, audio, e   
Source: Bought
ISBN(HB): 9781529435573

I have to say, I paused over A Granite Silence because I thought at first that might be "true crime" and I have a bit of a dislike of that genre. But I love Nina Allan's books and trust her as an author so was curious to see what she had written.

And I am so glad I did that because this is a wonderful book, albeit, at times, a painful one to read. 

But first, about that genre label. Showing how false and misleading these things are, yes, this book is about a true crime - the murder of a young girl, Helen Priestly, in 1930s Aberdeen - but it is also a work of fiction, and many other things besides. Allan gives us a razor sharp analysis of the crime and its aftermaths - and its beforemaths too. But she also wraps that in fiction. The ideas roll around like quicksilver, the book imagining the lives of the various protagonists, often in quite tangential settings and circumstances and far from Aberdeen.  Often, the settings often turn out not to be so tangential at all. There are alternative timelines and lives here too, all of which enrich the central events, and even pieces of clear fiction which might stand as complete stories in themselves. 

In Allan's hands, Aberdeen becomes a nexus, a place haunted by emigrés, journalists drawn to the events portrayed here and by the author herself as she describes her investigation of the murder and the subsequent trial but also fills us in on the wider past, the city and the country. She shows that Aberdeen is a complex place which has actually had many pasts.  There are even some science-fictional elements in this mass of stories, hinting at other worldly goings on.

I felt that A Granite Silence has implicit, but real, connections with other of Allan's books,  particularly The Rift and The Race, both of which turned on disappearances and loss and both of which also touched on wider alternate realities. In A Granite Silence things are more realist, but the exploration, in the second half of the book, of the trial which followed young Helen's murder naturally engages the same sense of multiple realities - that's the point of a trial, surely, you tip out everything on the table and try to sort out all the possibilities?

The book also covers an extraordinary range of other subjects, ranging from a modernised version of Burn's Tam O'Shanter (a poem I studied for O level English literature - at last, I felt as I read this, that has come in useful!) to Harry Houdini's visit to Aberdeen to the development of forensic science to the sheer difficulty of finding what becomes of people, only a few decades back, when there is no Internet to force them to leave breadcrumb trails.

It's difficult to do justice in a short review to the sheer breadth of this book, to its empathy for the poor souls devastated by tragedy nearly a hundred years ago or to the pains Allan takes to show how the great web of connections, of society, while stretched and holed, reaches forward. Far from being preoccupied by a shocking crime, Allan uses her art to get beyond that granite silence, to hear the very stones ringing to vanished footsteps, to futures that never were. The various strangers who people her Aberdeen and then move on are like sonic waves, imaging what can't be seen in the murk of the North Sea waters.

A profound, moving and thought-provoking book, but also a joy to read.

For more information about A Granite Silence, see the author's website here.