The Silent City by Sarah Davis-Goff: Dublin women at the sharp end of a zombie apocalypse

A zombie apocalypse forms the backdrop to Silent City, Sarah Davis-Goff’s sequel to Last Ones Left Alive (2019). The novel opens with Orpen, an “outlier”, explaining how she has travelled from an island off Ireland’s west coast to become one of the banshees, a female security detachment that defends Phoenix City – a walled compound enclosing the Phoenix Park – against hordes of zombie-like skrake lurking beyond the walls.

But the banshees can only do so much, “working together, working towards something forever just out of reach while whatever is coming up behind us – famine, disease, the skrake – inches closer”. Phoenix City is atrophying under the aegis of the all-male “Management”, and whatever society still survives is degenerating into a caste system of primitive hierarchy: “We’re all dying here, dying slow unless we’re dying quick.”

Silent City, the latest novel to emerge from Ireland’s small but perfectly formed genre of speculative fiction (see also Sarah Maria Griffin and Jo Zebedee), builds on the success of Last Ones Left Alive in creating a futuristic, feminist heroine. As Orpen navigates the labyrinthine world of the banshees – a kind of Spartan militia – we are drawn into a claustrophobic, secretive milieu in which fellow feeling is considered a weakness. “We are enforcers,” observes Orpen coldly as she contrasts her role with the other women – “breeders, skivs, even the children” – of Phoenix City. “We traditionally aren’t here to help.”

[ Last Ones Left Alive review: Survival thriller in dystopian Ireland ]

But while Davis-Goff’s micro-world building delivers a persuasive account of simmering revolution against a backdrop of women driven to make impossible choices, the larger world-building lacks definition. We are given vague references to “the Emergency” and the “ruiners” who created the devastated world beyond Phoenix City, but little – other than greed – to explain the virus that infected the ravenous skrake, which is rather a convenient threat: an amorphous horde massed beyond the walls, but incapable of scaling or otherwise penetrating the defences (or even trying to).

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These, however, are relatively minor issues when set against what Davis-Goff’s achieves here. As a novelist charting the grim possibilities of a future, dystopian Ireland, Davis-Goff is one of the leading pioneers of an Irish genre that is slowly but surely declaring itself a force to be reckoned with.