Sound Mind – Tricia Sullivan
Hachette Livre Orbit, 2007
357 pages
RRP: AU$22.95
ISBN: 978-1-84149-405-0

Reviewed by Jacinta Rosielle

As a reader with an adoration of stories which make me question what is real, and as a musician with a hankering for experimentation, this book had swallowed me whole within the first twenty pages. I hadn’t read any books by Tricia Sullivan before and on the few occasions that I’d closed the book I was having to wipe a few spots of drool off the back cover as I eyed the thumbnails of two of her other novels, making plans to order these sometime soon.

The protagonist, Cassidy, is studying music at Bard College. She hears an overwhelmingly loud, strange noise while hanging out in her boyfriend’s dorm one day, and they both escape the college grounds but lose each other on the way out. At a nearby petrol station to which others have flocked in a rush to escape the unknown force, she sees a news broadcast which informs them that the area in which they live has been cut off from the rest of the state. No answers are yet forthcoming as to the cause of the separation.

As Cassidy learns to find food and barter within a society that is quickly coming apart at the seams, she begins to believe it (the ongoing noise and dividing force) has something to do with her. She continues to hear the strange noise at varying volumes, although others don’t always hear it. She learns not to speak of certain people, places and events that no-one else remembers, unless she wants to endure yet another quizzical glance between people she would otherwise call her friends. She learns that she can traverse into the areas that have been cut off to everyone else. And, perhaps the most mystifying, she remembers strange things appearing in a forest in which she’d been experimenting with a sound for an upcoming assignment, a sound with which she wanted to represent a kind of apocalypse.

After we learn that Cassidy has suffered a spontaneous, complete memory loss when she was younger, a memory she had to rebuild rather than fill in empty spaces, the reader begins to question her reliability as a narrator. Can we trust what she perceives with her senses? But I began questioning my own ability as a reader, as the story reached towards its climax, which was a ripe moment as ever for the ol’ “What the?!”

What begins as a survival/mystery story in a little town, becomes a psychological novel, and then wanders into territory of which the surrealists would be proud, while delivering a rather unique perspective on music. And although there’s so much I’d like to tell anyone who’ll listen about the latter half of this book, that would spoil some fine, fine scenes. If you’ve ever thought art was a powerful thing, read Sound Mind.