Book review: Evie Wyld’s new novel opens with Max, who has recently died, trying to come to terms with his new state: “Love is what brings about a ghost – isn’t it? The unfinished business of love. There is something I didn’t get around to saying to her, a hidden secret that I will guide her to, and then a white light will beckon me through a doorway, and I will wait there for her with a full head of hair and a prick that is rock hard all the time and no bad breath or occasional wheat intolerance.”
He is right about hidden secrets, but mainly they are secrets hidden from Max himself by his girlfriend Hannah. All Wyld’s books are imbued with a touch of supernatural, but this levity feels at first like a departure for her. Don’t get too comfortable with that feeling.
Hannah is Australian, an aspiring writer who has stopped writing and works in a London pub. She tells Max she is estranged from her family because they’re “boring bogans”, and tension arises when Max suggests going to Australia to visit. He has marriage and babies in his sights. Unbeknown to him, Hannah has just had an abortion.
She is ambivalent about their relationship, which is fractious and snippy. She’s awkward and self-conscious – as a child she would have worried about the shape her face made in a pillow or how the soles of her feet looked when she was sunbathing – and this colours her relationship with Max. “I hate being in the wrong,” thinks Hannah, “but today in the wrong feels like the only place I am welcome”. She is a puzzle to him, unknowable. She avoids thinking about the past. We get hints in this timeline that things are heading to a dark place.
Hannah is in England not just to escape her family, but to run to the moment when things first fractured, depicted in a photo she has carried since childhood – when her grandmother’s mother took her to Australia, and the violence wrought on her family began. “We never should have wound up in Australia,” thinks Hannah, “with our bare feet and lips cracked from not wearing zinc. With the smell of armpits, with the white cockatoos screaming us awake in the morning, the waft of meat pies and limeade.”
“Then” is the timeline of Hannah and her family eking out a living on a goat farm and the complex, brutal web of secrets that has been spun since that moment of emigration.
The fracturing of the narrative into multiple third-person viewpoints disorients the reader. It’s as if Hannah, in remembering her past, can remember it as happening only to someone else. There are some secrets that even she is not party to and yet they have no doubt shaped her DNA. We learn why she is such a bad cook because we learn why her mother is such a bad cook: “She’s putting her secrets in those cakes and that is why the cakes come out bitter and hard and unlovely.”
Typically, Wyld doesn’t gratuitously show the minutiae of abuse and violence but rather their immediate and longer-term after-effects.
It’s hard not to read the structure and its disjointed narrative as deliberate, which of course it is. Nothing in an Evie Wyld novel is left to chance. From the multiple fractures in the book to the sensory, visceral details of decay and human detritus and invasive creepy-crawlies that turn the stomach, here is a writer very much in control of the reader’s experience.
While Max is floating and disembodied, Hannah feels like she might float away herself, and uses self-harm and coffee-making and a square of green glass to ground herself. But why? The puzzle of Hannah will eventually be solved; Max is too focused on his own “every love story is a ghost story” journey to witness it.
The Echoes, by Evie Wyld (Vintage, $38), is on sale now.
