I don’t believe in ghosts, which, since my death, has become something of a problem. So begins Stella Prize and Miles Franklin Award Winner, Evie Wyld’s haunting new novel, THE ECHOES.
So, THE ECHOES is a ghost story, with echoes of zombie imagery -It was not enough inside of her, I wanted to crawl inside, live underneath her ribs…I want to eat her skin and swallow her bones.
So, THE ECHOES is a love story, but also a history – by the time her mother’s body stopped living, the person they knew had long galloped off across the water, leaving Melissa and her father stood in the mud of what was left behind.
As its title suggests, THE ECHOES resonates from a particular source, then reverberates, ripples and reflects in concentric tales and timelines of Then and After.
There are multiple narrators, living and dead, commenting on the present and the past, exhuming secrets that refuse to stay buried, skeletons from colonial closets, spectres that know no terrestrial boundaries.
THE ECHOES moves between modern day London and rural Australia in the last century and grapples with the grip that history holds on later generations, wrestling the weight of the past as it bears on the future, pinning it to the mat of memory.
A fascinating story line facilitated by lyrical, lucid prose, THE ECHOES has a certain enigmatic clarity within its labyrinthine structure. Characters are complex, incidents intricate, in a plot line that is piercingly sad and beautifully melancholic.
Like the Cole Porter lyrics, THE ECHOES goes to your head and lingers like a haunting refrain, spinning around in your brain, like the bubbles in a glass of champagne.
Oh, what a beautiful mourning.
THE ECHOES by Evie Wyld is published by Vintage Australia.
