MEMOIRYOU CAN'T HELP warming to Sara Maitland. Named Sarah at birth but falling in love with Coleridge in her teens and learning that he prevailed upon his wife and lover - both of whom were called Sarah - to drop the superfluous 'h', she promptly dropped hers too.
This anecdote sets the scene - Maitland is a rottweiler of enthusiasm who pursues her ideas to the end, eloquently and learnedly, and nowhere more than in this, her latest work, A Book of Silence, in which she details her search for that phenomenon which is so often absent from our lives.
Her quest takes her, physically, to Skye, to Galloway, to a flotation tank, to the Lake District and to the Sinai desert. But we also travel on a virtual journey through the whole narrative associated with silence. Reading her book one evening in what I thought was silence, the rocking chair creaked, the flames of the fire crackled, the windows rattled in their frames.
Wondering if silence is an absence or a lack, she decides that "silence is multifaceted, a densely woven fabric of many different strands and threads". The BBC sound archives has tapes of silence in a sitting room, in a cement bunker, in a garage, on a beach.
She focuses on the solitary sailor and quotes single-handed yachtsman Bernard Moitessier who, tipped to get the fastest-time prize in the 1968 global non-stop race, pulled out of it because he couldn't face what he called a return to the European "snake-pit". He had experienced extreme silence and liked it. "What you call isolation, I call communion," he wrote.
And still at sea, we read of Ann Davison, who "sailing her ship home after the death of her husband noted a multitude of tiny voices from behind the bulkheads . . .". Though few know of her, Davison ( my own current obsession) later became the first woman to sail singlehanded across the Atlantic. Except she didn't sail home after losing her husband, as Maitland writes. When they were shipwrecked off Portland Bill, Davison survived but her boat, as well as her husband, was lost.
So graphic are Maitland's descriptions of solitary silence that, remembering such a moment myself on top of a mountain, I recalled thinking I could hear the air breathe. Then she brings us down to earth with a noisy bump. Out in the Sinai with a group of silence-seekers, she spends a night away from them all on a nocturnal vigil. When "listening to the silence", she tells us, there is no ambient sound "just . . . noises laid on to the silence . . . a single sound 'chomp' (camel); 'rustle' (sleeping bag); or my cigarette being inhaled." What? She's in the desert trying to get a handle on some sort of spirituality and she's smoking? And then, elsewhere, she gets some young men to shoot the rabbits in her garden - 36 in total. This woman has feet of clay after all and that's reassuring.
But Sinai is merely a stopping point on the journey and Maitland's has been a long one. Educated at Oxford, she married young - her husband was an American clergyman of Protestant persuasion and all was well until the dark days of Thatcherism, when some of us got politics and Maitland got religion, embracing Rome when her marriage broke up. Other people's gods crop up a lot in her writing and though Satan is characterised as female, Maitland's God is never defined, leading one to assume s/he meets the Christian criteria for that position.
In her search for silence, she visits a couple of monasteries and later checks out those two groups to whom silence is a central plank in their way of life: Buddhists and Quakers. But no, they aren't right either and it's here that her story weakens and becomes somewhat irritating. She is restless, moving from house to house, from England to Scotland, from religion to religion, constantly expressing longing and yearning, finding happiness in isolated moments but only until whatever lies round the next corner beckons.
Finally, she buys a plot of land in Galloway which seems idyllic: up on the moors, the only sound that of the little Glasgow-to-Stranraer train clanking past once a day, or the noise of a farmer's quad bike bouncing across the track. Described on the book cover as a hermitage, her cottage has all the usual mod cons including internet and under-floor heating. Parked outside is a car. She tutors a creative-writing course online and spends three hours a day praying. For two days a week, she unplugs the phone. She goes to Mass locally on Sundays and once a month does a big shop in a town 15 miles away. Her socialising - her extended family is large, as is her circle of friends - is limited to six days a month.
On her moor, Maitland may not encounter the Hound of the Baskervilles but it certainly looks as if she is being pursued by the Hound of Heaven.
Mary Russell is a writer with a special interest in travel. Her website is www.maryrussell.info