Evie Wyld’s fourth novel, The Echoes, is by turns exquisite and frustrating. It orbits the world of Hannah, a white Australian in her 30s, living in a South London flat, which she now unknowingly cohabits with the ghost of her boyfriend Max. Bound to their former home, Max is a spectral narrator, compelled to watch Hannah move on. Wyld excels in her compassionate and comic observations about human foibles.
The storyline shifts between glimpses of Hannah’s teen years in the Australian outback, to her adult life before and after Max’s death. Wyld’s enthralling cast of characters use alternating perspectives to mould our understanding of Hannah’s complicated, painful upbringing, illuminating the relatives and secrets she has desperately concealed.
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We piece together Hannah’s early life in rural Australia, in a family home built on stolen land renamed ‘The Echoes’. Their house bordered a residential school where many Indigenous Australian children were forcibly interned, following the colonial mission that abducted thousands of kids from their families, eradicating Aboriginal communities through the brutal abuse of ‘re-education’.
Hannah’s parents refuse to engage with the barbaric legacy of the schoolhouse – and their own collusion. The white avoidance of responsibility is a key mechanism of Wyld’s plot. And yet, there is a danger that this history is skated over by the main players’ action. There are many ghosts in this book, but only some are permitted to speak. Still. The Echoes is an ambitious, often courageous novel in fractal form; voicing the harm that echoes through generations.
The Echoes by Evie Wyld is out now (Jonathan Cape, £18.99). You can buy it from The Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support The Big Issue and independent bookshops.
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