:: Lee Rourke Homepage ::

""A story assembled from everyday objects, unassumingly and quietly, that stuns and horrifies by increments...The Canal may look, at first glance, like a love story, but it harnesses the power of parable." John Wray, author of Lowboy.

Search This Blog

Tuesday 9 February 2010

In Print(7) . . .

After The Fire, A Still Small Voice, By Evie Wyld

As in all catastrophe, war creates its own aftermath. It leaves in its wake all manner of human detritus – physical or emotional – alone to cope with its horrors in silence. Evie Wyld's debut novel attempts to decipher the trauma of war. Unfolding in eastern Australia, within an unrelenting landscape, After the Fire, A Still Small Voice tells the stories of fathers and sons learning to cope with the realities of wars they do not understand.

Following a miserable relationship, Frank moves to his grandparents' old shack by the sea. He tries to fit in with the local community, living off the land, drinking heavily and trying to make sense of his shattered life. Leon, the son of European immigrants, witnesses the breakdown of his family after his father returns from the Korean war a changed man, before finding himself conscripted as a machine-gunner in Vietnam – leaving him with no other alternative but to escape.

Landscape plays a major role in Wyld's writing. It opens up the narrative, creating an eerie metaphorical space, or silence, between each character, mirroring the physical and mental fissures that separate each generation. Although nothing is truly silent: even the landscape is "thick with insect noise". The power of this mesmerising novel hangs on the premise that silence is impossible, while such impossibility forces the men who litter its landscape to desire it all the more.

Frank seeks a silence his father and grandfather could never attain. Leon, like his own father, is seeking the same but, like the echo of a machine-gun, each reverberation hangs too heavily to ignore. Both are suspended in a present that doesn't belong to them. Within this space there is nothing to do other than look back at the catastrophes that have shaped their lives.

Wyld's writing is assured enough to elongate metaphor and symbolism, creating a novel both taut and otherworldly. This adroit examination of loss, lostness and trauma is the beginning of great things.

[original source: The Independent, Wednesday, 23 September 2009]

*

Blog Archive

Labels

2014 (1) 3:AM Magazine (1) 3AM Magazine (1) 4th Estate (1) aircraft (1) Amber (1) Andrew Gallix (2) Ann Quin (2) Art (1) Ben Myers (2) Book covers (1) Book Launch (2) Booker Prize (1) Bookforum (1) Boredom (1) Bram van Velde (1) Brighton (1) Broadway Books (1) Captain Beefheart (1) Carcanet Press (2) Central Station Design (1) Chris Killen (1) Competition (1) Dalkey Archive (4) Dante (1) Death (1) Dumitru Tsepeneag (1) Ellis Sharp (1) Events (1) Everyday Publishing (1) Evie Wyld (2) Gabriel Josipovici (5) Gavin James Bower (1) Georges Bataille (1) Gwendoline Riley (1) Hans Fallada (1) Harper Collins. (1) Hendrik Wittkopf (1) HP Tinker (1) Hubert Selby Jr (1) INS (1) Interviews (1) Jacques Roubaud (1) JD Salinger (1) Jean-Philippe Toussaint (4) JG Ballard (1) Jim Carroll (1) Joe Stretch (1) Jon McGregor (2) Jonathan Lethem (1) Karen Jackson (1) Kevin Cummins (1) Leda and the Swan (1) Light Boxes (1) List (2) Litro (1) LRB (1) Lydie Salvayre (2) Manchester United (1) Manifestos (1) Marion Boyars (1) Martin Heidegger (1) Melville House (11) Modernism (1) Myth (1) New Statesman (1) New Stuff (1) New York Times (1) Nick Cave (1) Noah Cicero (1) Not The Booker Prize (1) Novel (1) Olivier Pauvert (1) On Boredom (1) Pylons (2) Readings (2) Regent's Canal (2) Reviews/Criticism Archives (9) RIP (1) Samuel Beckett (3) Shane Jones (1) Sophie Lewis (1) Steve Finbow (2) Steve Mitchelmore (2) Stewart Home (1) Stuart Evers (1) Swans (1) Tao Lin (3) The Big Green Bookshop (1) The Canal (15) The Divine Comedy (1) The Failure Six (1) The Guardian (2) The Independent (6) The Quarterly Conversation (1) This Space (1) To Hell With Publishing (2) Tom McCarthy (3) Tony O'Neill (2) vapour trails (1) Vulgar Things (1) Yale University Press (1) Yeats (1) Zachary German (1)