Evie Wyld’s previous novel, The Bass Rock, was a disturbing, cunningly constructed triptych on the theme of violent misogyny as seen through the eyes of characters including a gaslit 1950s housewife and a girl on the run from 18th-century witch hunters. Rapturously reviewed, it won the Stella prize in Australia (where Wyld, a Londoner, grew up), yet I can’t help feel it didn’t quite get the renown it deserves – no UK award nominations – perhaps because it had the misfortune to be published in March 2020, three days into lockdown, when simpler distraction was wanted?
In The Echoes, her fourth novel, darkness lies below the surface. At heart, the story is one of everyday strife involving a thirtysomething London couple, as Hannah, a barmaid, and Max, a creative writing lecturer, find their relationship strained by whether they’ll marry and have children. The unvoiced tension finds an outlet in bickering about why, after six years together, she hasn’t introduced him to her family in Australia. She tells him they’re boring, and says something else vague about a tragic road accident, but the novel shows that the truth is more complicated – her past being one of many things Hannah is keeping to herself, not least the abortion she’s just had.
Wyld’s novels are always structurally intricate, with jumbled timelines and perspectival switches, and this is no different. The headline twist here is that Max is dead by the time he’s recalling his side of the story: “I do not believe in ghosts, which, since my death, has become something of a problem.” As an opening gambit, it’s a good one, and there’s much tender comedy as well as pathos in his spectral recollection of their life together as he watches her hook up with a mutual acquaintance he’d always been suspicious of; Max finally has cause to thank Hannah’s pesky cat when it disrupts the afterglow.
But as the book splinters to show us some four generations of the family he’s been kept away from, it becomes clear that this isn’t Max’s novel. Fragmentary vignettes tell the story of Hannah’s girlhood in the shadow of a dilapidated former reform school. We see her confused longings in adolescence while observing male reactions to her older sister, Rachel, and what Rachel went through with uncle Tone, a hard-drinking labourer whose quick temper leaves him unable to hold down a job. Tone’s chaotic upbringing – a grave tale involving drink, drugs and child abuse – turns out to be central in the jigsaw-puzzle portrait gradually assembled of where Hannah is coming from, in every sense, by the time she and Max get together.
Wyld does a lot of work in just over 200 pages – a feat of compression in a novel that ends up a kind of stretchy vessel flooded with life. Some of the book’s most vivid presences are its most short-lived, among them Hannah’s childhood neighbour, Manningtree, whose parents ran the reform school next door; growing up, Hannah and Rachel view him as a creepy old man, but the backstory we’re shown poignantly portrays his dawning horror of being raised as the beneficiary and future perpetrator of colonial violence.
There are moments, though, when Max’s spectral narration feels like a way to anchor our attention to a fractured storyline so elusively diffuse that we almost forget the narrative’s slowest-burning fuses: why did Hannah end her pregnancy, and how did Max die? One question gets a firm answer; the other is left for the reader to gauge against the sheer weight of psychic baggage unpacked by the novel’s cut-up narration. You might say Max has been ghosted by Hannah’s secret history, and that her past has done the same thing to her, too, both of them absent presences of a kind in a book shaped by the indefinable impact of the past on the present. That theme has become the home turf of literary fiction – the trauma plot – but rarely has it been approached with such clever indirection.
• The Echoes by Evie Wyld is published by Jonathan Cape (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
