In Review – I Go Quiet

By: David Ouimet
Publisher: Canongate

"I Go Quiet" by David Ouimet - Cover

I am different. I am the note that’s not in tune. I go mousy. I go grey.

Oh, where to begin with this stunningly beautiful, deeply emotional little book? When a book arrives with glowing endorsements on the front and back covers from Neil Gaiman, Philip Pullman and Stephen Fry, it almost feels redundant for me to add my humble tuppence worth of opinion; I’d imagine many readers would already be leaning towards reading I Go Quiet just on the recommendations of those exceptionally fine writers alone.

Nonetheless, I’m going to try and say a little about it – I feel compelled to, this book just spoke to me, right from the moment I first put it on the shelves of the bookstore I work in. I was totally taken with it right away, right from the cover, before I had even opened a page.

Sometimes that just happens with readers, we find treasure and some part of our literary soul recognises something new and important that we simply must read. Over the years I’ve referred to that sudden tingle I get from a new book, that feeling that I just know I will love it even before reading it, as my bookselling Spidey-sense, and it has never steered me wrong.

"I Go Quiet" by David Ouimet - Sample Art

Our protagonist is a young girl – rather lonely, isolated, alone even in a busy crowd. She moves through the beautifully painted city scenes, some in dark, industrial Gothic shades of grey and dark blue and black, others brightly lit daytime scenes of a handsome, bustling city, full of life. In each, though, she is solitary, walking alone through empty nocturnal streets, or again always alone through the crowded, sunlit daytime scenes. The vast school scenes and the endless ranks of others hint at Gilliam Brazil-like darkness and emphasise her aloneness: there is that feeling in crowds that everyone else around you seems to know what they are doing, where they are going, what their part is in the greater group and how to get along with it.

Our girl, as she observes, doesn’t know how to be in these groups. She fears she hears whispered words as she passes by, as if the larger group is talking about this strange, solitary little figure.

It’s a feeling most of us will have had at some point – it is so very easy to feel alone even in a vibrant city crowd, to think everyone around you seems to have figured out this Life stuff except you, that they all know what they are doing and, perhaps, they are laughing at us for clearly not knowing. And it’s usually nonsense, everyone else is often thinking the same of other people. But that depression and isolation, that lowering of our own self-worth, these things aren’t rational, and telling ourselves that we are being silly and it isn’t really like that doesn’t help our mental state.

"I Go Quiet" by David Ouimet - Sample Art

"I Go Quiet" by David Ouimet - Sample Art

Like many of us she has a retreat – she has books. What beautiful scenes Ouimet paints, as she browses the bookshelves, enormous, towering stacks of shelves in a dream library that looks like something straight from the mind of Borges. She finds books, reading, words, imagination, escape. The world may be scary, but the books are always there, they are always waiting for her, never judge her. We’re all readers here, I’m sure many of us have experienced similar feelings, embraced the warm, papery touch of books to carry us away from everything that is wrong with our lives in the so-called real world (I’m often unsure that in fact the Real World is any more real than the many worlds I have traversed in books, if I am honest).

But this is not just a retreat from a lonely reality, the library, the books, the stories, the words, they are not just some substitute for the real world for the girl. No, they are her gateway to understanding the wider world and that she does really belong in it. She reads how everything is created of the same stuff, and that means, she realises, that she too is part of everything in return. She’s not that different, she’s not alone, and if she is quiet, it is because she is biding her time, assembling her words, her stories, and when the time comes:

When I am heard, I will build cities with my words. They will not be quiet.

"I Go Quiet" by David Ouimet - Sample Art

"I Go Quiet" by David Ouimet - Sample Art

I was utterly spellbound by I Go Quiet. I recognise in it the child I was, lost in bookshops and libraries, I recognise also the adult me who still loses himself in pages. And I recognise the influence of those books, of those words, their power to fire the imagination, to inspire, that reading is not a retreat from the world, it is an engagement with it at the most fundamental level, an attempt to understand and articulate the human experience, and that reading can empower us to face the slings and arrows of the world, arming us with a shield made of book covers and a sword forged from words.

The artwork is simply beautiful, painted pages, often using double-page spreads. Using very little text, strategically placed and sized to infer more emotional depth, placed on the pages rather than in speech bubbles or dialogue boxes, I Go Quiet has a mixture of the graphic novel format and the style of a traditional children’s picture book, which seems appropriate as it is an all-ages work, suitable for both younger and older readers.

It’s a short work, with little text, but that doesn’t matter, because it is the kind of book you read slowly, drinking it in, then you re-read it, looking for more details in the gorgeous art. I’ve read it several times now and each time I find myself wonderfully lost in its emotional currents, feel it making me both cry and smile.

Unusual, moving, and utterly beautiful.

Joe Gordon

I Go Quiet by David Ouimet is available now from all good book shops and online stores (AmazonUK Affiliate Link)

More about I Go Quiet at igoquiet.com | Follow David on Instagram @d.ouimet

• David Ouimet’s illustrations have featured on album covers and books, including Robert D. San Souci’s Dare to be Scared book series and Nancy Etchmendy’s Cat in Glass and other Tales of the Unnatural. He also illustrated Daydreams for Night by musician John Southworth. His work was selected for the Society of Illustrator’s Annual 59 and was exhibited at the Museum of American Illustration in New York City in February 2017



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