In Carole Hailey’s debut novel, The Silence Project, one woman’s well intentioned protest morphs into a world-wide movement with sinister plans to control population growth.

It’s a thought-provoking exploration of the nature of cults. How a simple idea can mushroom beyond all expectations with its original purpose hijacked by individuals with an entirely different agenda.

The cult imagined in the novel is known simply as “The Community”, a group that started as a solo protest by a woman in Kent. Rachel believes the world would be a better place if people (particularly those in positions of authority) listened more and spoke less. She leaves her home, husband and teenage daughter Emilia to set up home in a tent at the foot of the garden. They never hear her voice again.

As more women are drawn to Rachel’s idea of a the silent protest, the group shifts gear. Handmade posters give way to professionally designed and printed leaflets and social media channels activated to reach women all around the world. All are branded with the powerful image of a gigantic pair of lips with an oversized forefinger pressed against them.

And then comes “the Event”, a benign sounding word that actually refers to a horrific act — the night when Rachel, along with 21,000 other women around the world set themselves on fire.

The founder dies but Rachel’s legacy lives on; The Community becoming one of the biggest campaigning organisations ever seen, with its fingers in many different pies. In the eyes of its new cohort of followers, Rachel acquires the status of a saint — forever known as Rachel of Chalkham — a woman whose futuristic vision they are destined to fulfil. Woe betide anyone who dares to criticise or challenge their methods — “if you’re not for us, you’re against us” becomes the Community’s mantra.

Humanity, it seemed, was looking for a new direction and believed the Community would provide it. In the post-Event aftermath, millions of people flocked to join, adding their voices to the demands that their politicians, their armies and their enemies stop talking and start listening”

To Rachel’s daughter Emilia however, nothing the Community does in the aftermath of “the Event” is what her mother would have wanted. She plans to set the record straight by publishing her mother’s notebooks, using Rachel’s own words to undercut the Community’s vast PR machine.

The Silence Project is written as if it’s a memoir, charting the seemingly unstoppable rise of the Community. Mingled with this is Emilia’s own story about the way her mother’s protest affected her life. She wants to tell the truth about her mother but in doing so, she has to find the truth of her own feelings towards Rachel. Resentment, anger, grief, frustration all form part of this complex relationship.

This is a novel rich in ideas. In the hands of a more experienced author it had the potential to become a landmark text. But it never quite hit the mark. After a powerful start, the narrative fell down into a dry account where personal recollections were mixed with an almost a documentary style of narrative. For some strange reason, key points in the progress of the Community, had to include citations about the sources so we were treated to the page numbers of specific journal entries; plus links to pseudo website and faux extracts from academic reports.

So we got passages like:

At the beginning of September 2007, Rachel took part in the Community’s first sit-down — at the Hampshire County Council offices in Basingstoke. The protest lasted for little over an hour, police were called and the women left (#15, pp87-89).

A few uses of this approach would have been OK but they happened so frequently that the narrative often felt dry and overly long.

Coupled with that, Rachel’s decision to use silence as a force for change didn’t have the ring of believability — at one point Emilia describes it an “antidote” to calamities such as the 2004 tsunami and the 2005 London bombings.

An antidote to the horrific atrocities we inflicted on each other. All the natural catastrophes that we humans were responsible for accelerating . All the violence and harm we were doing to ourselves and to the world itself. Humanity had to change and the Community would show us how.

How a silent protest or a plea to “talk less, listen more” would have prevented a tsunami isn’t made clear. But maybe that’s the nature of cults — its supporters get swept along with the big idea rendered in a very simple slogan, that they don’t question the how?.