Cyber apocalypse: The Silence, by Don DeLillo, reviewed

Elaborated over a writing career that spans half a century — a career crowned with every honour save the Nobel Prize — Don DeLillo’s great project has been to explore a world where paranoia is not only warranted but healthy, a sane response to imminent threat, man-made or otherwise. He didn’t win the Nobel again this year, and may never, but his literary stature remains colossal. He’s revered as a writer and also as a prophet, a bard who sings our future into being.

His very short, bracingly bleak new novel The Silence is DeLillo distilled. Anyone who doesn’t like the taste will find it unendurable; for fans it’s a straight shot of the good stuff.

The first scene is wholly static: a couple buckled up in their seats on a plane bringing them home from Paris to New York. Bored, exhausted, unable to sleep, the man, Jim, begins to recite the information on the screen:

‘Okay. Altitude thirty-three thousand and two feet. Nice and precise,’ he said. ‘Température extérieure minus fifty-eight C… Arrival time sixteen thirty-two. Speed four seventy-one mph. Time to destination three thirty-four.’

Jim’s wife, Tessa, a poet, is hunched over a small blue notebook, writing. ‘Filling time. Being boring. Living life.’ The stasis, the boredom — it’s all a lie, a comforting delusion. As Jim’s recitation ought to remind us, they’re hurtling through the sky, defying gravity, risking death. They’re heading in fact for a crash landing.

Jim and Tessa are expected later that afternoon in the Manhattan apartment of Diane and Max. It’s Super Bowl Sunday, 2022, and the two couples and another man, Martin, were supposed to watch the game together, a banal American ritual. But something inexplicable happens: just before kick-off, the television goes blank, the phones go blank.