05082013.YOUR WEEKEND.Photo Phil Reid/Dominion Post/Fairfax. Author Lloyd Jones in his inner city apartment. In his study where he writes. Past master: Lloyd Jones reveals a dramatic family history in his memoir A History of Silence. Photo: Phil Reid

Christchurch, like the writer Lloyd Jones, grew up in a state of forgetfulness. Subterranean fault lines craze the South Island of New Zealand and old maps spell out the swamp and wetlands of the city's foundations, but a plug of concrete and bitumen long hid the perils of peat, trapped water and river gravels from its citizens.

 Until February 2011. Then, a massive earthquake toppled the spire of the Anglican cathedral, grey, waterlogged sediment rose to the surface turning suburbs to slurry, and the true landscape reasserted itself. Trudging moraines of rubble many weeks later, Jones found himself thrown off balance by what he describes as a ''loosening of self''.
It's like looking at a jigsaw puzzle and the picture is incomplete ... and then, suddenly, some pieces are presented and they find connection. 
''Christchurch forgot what they sat on, and, in the same way but for different reasons, I realised that there was wilful forgetting in my family to the extent that I never once heard my father speak of his parents and only fleetingly and indirectly did my mother speak of hers,'' Jones recounts by phone from his home town, Wellington.
''If that's what you grow up with you tend not to look into those spaces, but when I went wandering through the landscape of the earthquake the foundations were revealed, the ground was ripped apart and there it all was: the liquefaction, the liquid mass that oozed out of the ground.''
In the parallels drawn between a broken city and family amnesia lies Jones' honest and thought-provoking memoir, A History of Silence. On Barbadoes Street, he watches stonemasons dangle from the dome of Christchurch's Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament, their job to dismantle the basilica stone by stone. There was no eureka moment, as Jones tells it, just a sense of a calling to pick apart his own memories.