Shtum by Jem Lester

When Ben and Emma fake a separation - a strategic decision to further Jonah's case in an upcoming tribunal - Ben and Jonah move in with Georg, Ben's elderly father.

In a small house in North London, three generations of men - one who can't talk; two who won't - are thrown together. As Ben battles single fatherhood, a string of well-meaning social workers and his own demons, he learns some difficult home truths.

Jonah, blissful in his innocence, becomes the prism through which all the complicated strands of personal identity, family history and misunderstanding are finally untangled.

Jem Lester was a journalist for nine years and saw the Berlin Wall fall in 1989 - and though there, he denies personal responsibility.

He was also the last journalist to interview the legendary Fred Zinnemann, before the director died. He denies responsibility for that too.

He taught English and Media studies at secondary schools for nine years. Jem has two children, one of whom is profoundly autistic, and for them he accepts total responsibility. He lives in London with his partner and her two children

WHY I WROTE SHTUM

The day after I took my own autistic son to begin a new life at a wonderful residential school in the country, I began the MA in Novel Writing at City University. Having just emerged from a year-long battle with the powers that be to get him there, it seemed serendipitous. After all, it had been more than a decade since I’d truly had the time to concentrate on writing – such was the level of dedication he required.

To be frank, I was exhausted and emotionally raw and the last subject I wanted to write about was autism. However, after frustrating my tutor, Jonathan, with adamant refusals to do so, I went home for the weekend and pondered long and hard, and came up with a list of pros and cons.

When I returned to City the following week, my conclusions were the following:

1. It would have to be funny – because autistic children can be joyously hilarious. As an example, when my son was six or seven, he developed an aversion to my mum. If she entered a room he was in, he’d physically push her out and close the door after her!

2. Honest – I was truly fed up with being asked what my son’s ‘special talent’ was.

3. How would I feel if someone else wrote this story?

And then there was the ironic realisation – long held – that my son, with no language, was far better at communicating his wants and needs than I was.

After all the soul searching and prevaricating, it was number two that kept hammering at me. I wanted to be honest, even if revealing the brutality of the reality was counter-intuitive. Before my son was born, I read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and loved it. Over the years since his birth, I have witnessed the elevation of autism – especially Asperger’s – to something almost fashionable. I’d heard autism used as excuses for shoddy behaviour, as an insult, and seen it adopted as a badge of honour. This was galling to me and, no doubt, to the countless other families dealing with the day-to-day misunderstandings and devastation it could bring. So I found myself in a challenging and (again counter-intuitively) responsible position – how could I write a novel that had a mute central character? How could I write a novel that was about autism yet, at the same time, dealt with so much more?