Synopses & Reviews
A searching, captivating look at the persistence of myth in our modern world
“By nature volatile and discordant, the human animal looks to silence for relief from being itself while other creatures enjoy silence as their birthright.”
In a book by turns chilling and beautiful, John Gray continues the thinking that made his Straw Dogs such a cult classic.
Gray draws on an extraordinary array of memoirs, poems, fiction, and philosophy to re-imagine our place in the world. Writers as varied as Ballard, Borges, Conrad, and Freud have been mesmerized by forms of human extremity—experiences that are on the outer edge of the possible or that tip into fantasy and myth. What happens to us when we starve, when we fight, when we are imprisoned? And how do our imaginations leap into worlds way beyond our real experiences?
The Silence of Animals is consistently fascinating, filled with unforgettable images and a delight in the conundrum of human existence—an existence that we decorate with countless myths and ideas, where we twist and turn to avoid acknowledging that we too are animals, separated from the others perhaps only by our self-conceit. In the Babel we have created for ourselves, it is the silence of animals that both reproaches and bewitches us.
Review
“Grays godless mysticism asks us to look outside ourselves and simply see. This is a lot more difficult than it sounds . . . Sometimes I think John Gray is the great Schopenhauerian European Buddhist of our age. What he offers is a gloriously pessimistic cultural analysis, which rightly reduces to rubble the false idols of the cave of liberal humanism.”—Simon Critchley, The Los Angeles Review of Books
“Nothing will get you thinking as much as this brilliant book.”—George Walden, The Sunday Telegraph
“At once daunting and enthralling, Grays remarkable new book shows us what it would be like to live without the distraction of consolations.”—Adam Phillips
“This is a very important book, and, I believe, a great one which will in the future, if we have one, be read by wiser generations than ours.” —Bryan Appleyard, Literary Review
“An absorbing book, full of challenging ideas you want to argue with.” —Joan Bakewell, New Statesman
“Extraordinary . . . Gray is undeniably a force to be reckoned with. He is the most lucid and compelling writer about political theory since Isaiah Berlin.” —Johann Hari, The Independent
“Remarkable . . . Straw Dogs is that rarest of things, a contemporary work of philosophy devoid of jargon, wholly accessible, and profoundly relevant to the rapidly evolving world we live in. Straw Dogs is a simple tool wielded effectively to devastating effect . . . After reading it youll find that everything remains exactly the same—but appears very different. And that is disturbing.” —Will Self, The Independent
“[Gray] blends lyricism with wisdom, humour with admonition, nay-saying with affirmation, making in the process a marvellous statement of what it is to be both an animal and a human in the strange, terrifying and exquisite world into which we straw dogs find ourselves thrown.”—John Banville, The Guardian“A work of modern philosophy that is no less readable and compelling for being rigorously bleak."—Publishers' Weekly
About the Author
John Gray is the author of many critically acclaimed books, including The Immortalization Commission, Black Mass, and Straw Dogs. A regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, he is the emeritus professor of European thought at the London School of Economics.