By Helen Elliott
FICTION
The Echoes
Evie Wyld
Vintage, $34.99
Trauma. Trauma. Trauma. The word once had clear, direct meaning as a physical wound. It still does in medical lexicons. Now it has been captured. By whom? Could be everyone? I hear it and read it daily as adjective and noun, both abstract and proper, and verb. Not often as adverb. Not yet.
The reliably good writer Evie Wyld has examined trauma in every one of her prize-winning novels. (She has won both the Stella and Miles Franklin awards.) She lives in London and considers herself English, but with an Australian mother and having lived here for chunks of her childhood, she has an intimate connection with the Australian landscape and people.
Evie Wyld writes intense prose.
Her new novel The Echoes is, like all her novels except The Bass Rock, set between Australia and England. Also in common with her earlier works: it’s about what has now become a common snatch of speech, intergenerational trauma. Or if you prefer a less abstract, but equally common snatch of speech, the weight of the past.
The Echoes is a series of chapters narrated by various characters; only the main characters have more than one chapter to themselves. It is set in the past, the present and the future. The first chapter is in the voice of Max, in London, in the present. Max is a ghost, and the (brilliant) opening line is: “I do not believe in ghosts, which, since my death, has become something of a problem.”
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The sense and sensibility of this reviewer responded with a few words precise enough for Deadwood. But, teeth clenched, on I went. And a good thing too, because Max becomes more like three fantastical ghosts – one a particularly glorious dog from a television series I adored long ago called Topper. Wyld has a canny understanding of the usefulness of a disembodied voice, a ghost being the invisible cloak from fairytales, an all-seeing, all-knowing narrator. Really, more novelists should refer to this.
Max is unexpectedly dead and his partner, Hannah, lives in the London flat that Max still inhabits. Hannah is Australian. Her family still lives there, but Hannah has as little contact with them as possible. Past trauma. This trauma – well, multiple traumas – have made her: parenting, addictions, culture clashes, generational despair, illness, lack of money – a précis of ordinary life. Note there is also an added, pointedly Australian factor.
This is all contained in a chapter called Mr Manningtree. Its titular character is the narrator, a man whose name is Francis but is always called Woody: clever, bullied and confined by his terrible fundamentalist Christian parents who have set up a school for “the Blacks” in the paddock on the edge of a country town.
His mother punishes the children “for their own good” and when they die, as they frequently do after the punishments, they are buried in the paddock. Woody is a sensitive boy who secretly puts sticks in the ground to mark the graves of these children. He becomes a sensitive and timid man who, of course, can never shake off the path delivered to him by fate. Trauma. This possibly obligatory but unnerving chapter is memorable because Wyld goes beyond the strained retelling of the personal grief of her unappealing characters.
Woody is an old man when Hannah and her rebellious sister are growing up in a house on the paddock next door. The girls have no sympathy for him and assume he is a paedophile for no reason other than their innate brutishness. Unkindness, especially female, seems to run in their family – different but just as horrifying as that of Woody’s unspeakable mother.
The novel sings, at times, with Wyld’s intense, original prose, particularly evident when writing Max, the ghost seeking a set of rules for himself when faced with “a biology of death without its corpse”.
But it requires a committed reading at times. Is Wyld wanting to discuss grief but falling back on trauma? It reads as shredded rather than fragmentary; fragments can fit together to make emotional clarity, but shreds collapse into a blur.
Reading is always personal – shockingly so – but The Echoes is stuffed with over-used material and, for me, even the frequent gleaming moments couldn’t rescue the messy confusion of grief and trauma. Trauma, as language and also as experience, is slouching towards cliche. Next stop it will have become a “right”. Grief, of course, is and must be a right.
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