Soon other people begin to hear the low, shimmering black drone, and eventually everybody in the world. No explanation or source for the phenomenon can be determined by scientists or governments, and no solution, or even an effective mitigating measure, is ever found. Many people take vows of silence, revert to exclusively ­text-­based communication, learn sign language. Authorities discourage gatherings that might include public speaking, but as the months and then years grind by with no end in sight, suicide rates, crime, violence and geopolitical instability surge. At first because of governmental pressure, and then of their own volition, people stop going out and interacting. Social life evaporates. The world begins to lose its mind.

There is the memorably unpleasant, if luridly unsubtle, scene at the climax of the book when the writer, stranded in his soundproofed apartment (his wife and daughter are long gone) and ­half-­mad with loneliness, savages his eardrums with a fountain pen in an attempt to save himself from ever again being subjected to the drone. The book ends months later, with the healing, newly deaf writer restored to a kind of peace, isolated but productive, working on a new book:

He sat at his table and wrote on through the night, turning out one sentence and then another, and another and another. It had been a long time since the sentences had come like this. He did not feel tired. He felt only the cold and lucid ecstasy of the flow, the sentences coming and coming. By the time the morning light was creeping across the table, he was done. He looked up. Branches were moving in the breeze outside his apartment window. He watched a leaf detach, flashing silver as it turned and turned in the air and dropped from sight. Already the feeling of cold and lucid ecstasy was emptying out of him, fading like it had never existed. He knew why. Out of the still depths of his ­self-­inflicted silence he heard it rising towards him again, the low, shimmering black drone.

The reviews at the time were tepid and puzzled, most critics interpreting the novel as an overheated and ­self-­indulgent allegory about the struggle of a sensitive artist to acclimatize themselves to the clamour and distraction of the modern world, and asking, quite reasonably, why anyone who was not a writer would give a shit about such a predicament. And no one did: the book found neither acclaim nor an audience and faded quickly from the cultural conversation.