The Echoes
by Evie Wyld
When Max dies, suddenly and unexpectedly, he finds himself, against his expectations and beliefs, haunting the London apartment where he lived with his girlfriend Hannah. In this new reality, where physical incorporeality has been replaced with a hypersensitive sense of observation, Max follows Hannah, and starts to piece together the secrets and pains of Hannah’s upbringing in “the Echoes”, a remote outback in rural Australia. Hers is an unsavoury past which she can never really escape, notwithstanding her attempts to reinvent herself and settle down on the other side of the world.
As in her previous novel The Bass Rock, Evie Wyld borrows tropes of Gothic and supernatural fiction to convey a tale of intergenerational trauma. The Bass Rock was in essence a fiercely feminist novel, a rant against patriarchal society. The Echoes is, in my view, more ambitious. The feminism is still there, but the novel is also an indictment of historic violence against the indigenous people of Australia, whose echoes fall like a curse on the descendants of the perpetrators and on the ground where the victims are, literally, buried.
As is typical of much contemporary “literary fiction” (for want of a better term), much of the novel’s originality lies in its conscious avoidance of a linear narration. The book is divided into short segments which alternate between “After” (the sections set in the present narrated in the first person by the ghost of Max), “Before” (the sections describing the relationship between Hannah and Max in the lead up to his death, and narrated in the first person by Hannah) and “Then” (the “Australian” segments). As in a Christopher Nolan movie, the parallel timelines and quick changes in POV require concentration and sometimes may be rather hard to follow, but they also create a sense of suspense and mystery as secrets and plot twists are slowly uncovered (even the way in which Max dies is only shown to is quite late in the book).
This is an intense and gut-wrenching read, and at times feels relentlessly
bleak. But, there are also flashes of humour, and the poignant ending provides
a catharsis of sorts. In my view, this makes it a more rounded novel than The
Bass Rock.
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