I worried when I began reading The Echoes by Evie Wyld – at the point where she introduces the school for Aboriginal girls – that this would be a preachy novel. It’s a trap Wyld avoided in The Bass Rock as compared to There Were Wolves by Charlotte McConoghy which I happened to read adjacently.
The Bass Rock was Pocket Bookclub’s favourite read of 2023 and we also read and enjoyed All the Birds Singing, so Wyld is up there in our esteem and had to maintain her status with The Echoes.
(Food: caught between the meat pies of Australia and a London Curry. Cuntail: Green Ghost)
The astounding thing about All the Birds Singing was its structure, a mirror, the plot moving forwards and backwards in alternate chapters. The Bass Rock had a structure like lace similar, but not as intricate as The Echoes. Like Bass Rock, The Echoes is worth a re-read because an unnoticed phrase or motif is echoed in another character and its significance is understood. For instance the first time someone says:
“I think sometimes silence is better than the wrong person speaking.”
Recurring spiders, cooking, decorating homes, lemon dresses, coffee-making come forth and recede in chapters titled, After, Before and Then, followed by a chapter from the point of view of a character, followed by After, Before, and Then and so one. Echo like.
I fell for this book in the opening chapter, from the point of view of Max (After) a ghost, stuck in the London flat he shared with his girlfriend, Hannah. There is some irony in Max, a creative writing teacher who tells his students characters must want something. Their want will power a story, but Max is unable to do anything, regardless of what he wants. Can a dead character have a character arc? The opening line of the book is Max’s.
“I do not believe in ghosts, which, since my death, has become something of a problem”
His world as a ghost is beautifully rendered.
“Time stutters. I can spend what feels like weeks watching the progress of a dust mote fall from a sunbeam.”
The minute details are enchanting.
“I am he of the forgotten capellini in the back of the cupboard, the beard shavings sitting in the U-bend of the sink and the cashews that fell under the appliances when I opened them roughly and they scattered on the floor and rather than sweep them up I kicked them to the corners of the room. Hannah will be the earring that she cried over when it was lost – it is down in the U- bend with my beard trimmings, safe in a nest. And the coppers whose jar she dropped and smashed so they spilled out and £1.26 went behind the washing machine to corrode and turn green.”
Hannah is in London, chasing a ghost of an idea in a photograph and escaping The Echoes where her family lives in the paddock of the former school for Aboriginal girls. These are the Then chapters, Hannah’s childhood with her parents, ‘missing’ sister Rachel, her mother’s brother Tone and his girlfriend. Mr Manningtree is still there, and he reflects on the placename, the Echoes.
“The Echoes. His parents thought it was a good name when they moved there and took up all those acres. They thought it represented the countryside, empty and huge, and how their teaching, their edification, would continue on into the future. But in reality it made a person think of ghosts.”
Did it get preachy? No, I don’t think so, thanks to the irreverence of Uncle Tone.
“I’m not sure if they’d have taken that deal, when we first arrived off the boats. ‘Yeah, mate, don’t worry about it. We’re here now. We’re going to take the land and murder your kids. And murder the memory that you even fucking existed. Take your language away. But it’s OK, because in about two hundredodd years a bunch of cunts in an art gallery will acknowledge you. And they’ll all feel a bit better. Deal?…There’s no unfucking it, is there? Once you’ve fucked it up there’s no unfucking it.”
There are ghosts and echoes throughout this book, the impact of trauma the most insidious ghostly echoes reaching and reverberating invisibly.
It might not be The Bass Rock but Wyld has not disappointed me with The Echoes.