In her fourth novel The Echoes, Evie Wyld orchestrates multiple narrative points of view through the intriguing figure of the echo. Love and trauma resound and rebound throughout. Persistent echoes are present in bodies, memories, photographs and places.
The Echoes is at once the name of a striking, if haunted, property in the remote northeastern goldfields of Western Australia on the lands of Wongi people, and a description of the novel’s strange modes of reverberation: the partial repetitions that become apparent as it moves between past and present, living and dead, hidden and revealed, rural Australia and suburban London.
Review: The Echoes –Evie Wyld (Vintage)
The most famous account of the mythical figure of Echo comes from Book III of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. A mountain nymph famed for her beautiful voice, Echo uses her vocal powers to distract Hera from Zeus’s infidelities. Hera’s revenge is to curse Echo so that she can no longer form an original sentence of her own, but can only repeat the last portion of the speech of others.
Echo thus becomes unable to woo the self-absorbed Narcissus, whom she loves unrequitedly; she can only ineffectively repeat his phrases. She eventually pines away and dies, though her voice persists, held in the rocks and mountains of her home country, amplifying and replaying the words of others.
The central romantic relationship of Wyld’s novel is quite different, but the trope of the echo is pertinent. The story of Max and Hannah is organised around a point of detonation in the present, but the larger structure of the novel inexorably reveals an equally significant point of detonation in Hannah’s past.
These harrowing instances of accident, loss, assault and disconnection are, in turn, reverberations of the cycles of traumatic inheritance in Hannah’s family, connected particularly but not exclusively to its women.
In a move that has become familiar in the contemporary anglophone novel, The Echoes commences with, and persistently returns to, the insights of a ghost narrator, who operates as an idiosyncratic kind of detective in the echoing afterlife. At the outset, we learn that Max, a creative writing academic, has died but cannot remember how.
George Saunders’ popular Lincoln in the Bardo (2017) has perhaps exerted an influence here. Max resembles a Saunders-style character, who has arrived in the hereafter and needs to find out how to operate as a ghost. He is unsure why he remains in the London flat he shared with the woman he loved and planned to marry.
Max observes Hannah, recalls their rich relationship, and reflects on his inability to influence events. His efforts to piece together clues about her life, and his questioning of his own ultimate purpose, align his perspective with that of the reader and evoke, often self-consciously, the process of writing and the nature of authorship.
Alongside the burlesque of his various attempts to convey a physical message to Hannah as an expression of his “unspent love”, the exacting quality of Max’s observations commands attention:
I watch as the flat becomes the home of others – the moths, the spiders, the silver fish, the dust motes and then the leftovers of the dead before me, the people who left parts of themselves dropped through the floorboards […] tumbleweed of hair and dust […] Eyelashes with their pinch of skin at the end.
Wyld pitches Max’s character nearer to the comic and unruly than the gothic and ghastly. His wit and playfulness in life are echoed in the afterlife. A seam of comedy thus complicates and enriches the melancholy we associate with spirits caught between worlds, unable, like Echo, to resolve their situation – or love, or age, or speak.
Time and space
The Echoes keeps readers on their toes in a number of ways. The discernment of different kinds of “echo” is only one of its challenges. It is also necessary to negotiate a striking number of different points of view, including shifts from first to third person (even for the same character) and from principal to peripheral characters.
Wyld’s montage of perspectives and her virtuosic vignettes are cannily arranged. The novel’s different time-frames require a kind of conscious detective work. Time becomes a central preoccupation of the novel at the level of structure as well as theme. Chapters have titles like “before”, “after” and “then”.
This discontinuous approach to time and space is familiar from trauma narratives that seek to emphasise the ethical significance of the effortful reconstruction that is part of the desire to bear witness. As we trace the often harrowing traumas at the centre of Wyld’s story of a damaged family (leading to a final, if partial, restoration), we become aware of the emotional complexities of memory.
Space and setting are central to this complexity. From her rather wonderful portrait of a south London flat, Wyld moves to a less precise but equally powerful evocation of the rural terrain of The Echoes, Hannah’s family farm, situated somewhere near Kalgoorlie in Western Australia.
The connection between these two wildly different milieus is encapsulated in a photograph, taken in south London, of Hannah’s grandmother as a child about to leave for Australia. The photograph becomes a visual starting point for a line of traumatised migrant and rural experiences, which the novel examines with a candid eye.
Wyld writes with a searing and disciplined unsentimentality, with comedy providing a backdrop but no particular relief. Her capacity to evoke the materiality of sensory experience, evident in her approach to Max’s ghostly subjectivity, is also evident in her portrait of Hannah and her sister Rachel as adolescents.
Wyld’s complex tonal range enables the most powerful aspect of The Echoes, which is its concern with relationships between women. These can be harrowing and destructive, especially when the novel focuses on the inter-generational damage done to and by mothers, though it also depicts restorative relationships between sisters, female friends and children.
Ghostly reverberations
The Echoes is an interesting but flawed novel. The prospect of a ghost narrator as a tragicomic echo was engaging (one thinks of examples of ghostly co-habitation as broad as The Ghost and Mrs Muir, for example), but the interruptions to realism did seem to warrant more experimental writing. The sustaining symbolism and melodramatic impulses, though self-consciously flagged, were still disorienting to navigate.
The issues the novel raises for the transnational writer – questions of homesickness, distance, dislocation and departure – were sometimes too evanescent and untethered, more like ghostly gestures than satisfying reverberations.
One of the novel’s most important reverberations, however, is when Wyld registers the effects of West Australian and broader Australian approaches to Indigenous children and “schooling” in the early and mid 20th century. This aspect of The Echoes elicited a welcome memory of the opening of Kim Scott’s wonderful novel Benang (1999), with its floating narrator, who is not precisely a ghost, but rather the unmoored product of “protective” policies designed to breed out Indigeneity and breed in whiteness.
In The Echoes, this history is understood with great sensitivity by Hannah’s Uncle Anthony, surely one of the novel’s most complex characters. Twenty-five years after the publication of Scott’s novel, this “echo” seems ethically and artistically satisfying.
Fiona Morrison does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
