The Echoes, Evie Wyld
Evie Wyld’s The Echoes is a short but structurally intricate novel about displacement and family secrets. Max and Hannah meet in a London creative writing class and quickly fall in love. But Hannah’s refusal to discuss her earlier life in Australia, reluctance to have children and self-sabotaging tendencies put their relationship under increasing strain. After Max dies unexpectedly, his ghost haunts the couple’s flat, desperate to discover what his girlfriend was hiding from him. Meanwhile, Wyld slowly reveals the truth about Hannah’s past through a story that spans three generations and covers multiple perspectives.
The Echoes is especially notable for its probing investigation of intergenerational trauma, a dominant theme in all this author’s books. Wyld encourages us to feel compassion for the self-destructive Hannah, her alcoholic Uncle Tone, her taciturn mother Kerry and her drug-addicted grandmother Natalia by showing how their personalities have been shaped by troubled or abusive childhoods. She also writes perceptively about the wider trauma of Australia’s Aborigines: Hannah and Uncle Tone are both haunted by stories of the Aboriginal children who attended a notoriously inhumane boarding school near their home in the outback. Small wonder Hannah comes to feel her family should never have left ‘the quiet mild green of England’.
The scenes involving Max’s ghost are less successful. Ghost stories are hard to bring off in our predominantly secular age, and Max’s perspective on the afterlife is undeniably depressing, even if he does have some good sardonic one-liners. Where Wyld does excel, however, is in her evocation of Max and Hannah’s earlier relationship. Her descriptions of their playful cooking sessions and physical pleasure in each other’s presence, and of Max’s sense that Hannah is ‘not so much perfect, but just right’, movingly convey how even damaged people can love and be loved.
The Echoes cannot be said to be a comfortable or easy reading experience. However, Wyld’s thoughtful writing about familial and romantic relationships and about Australia’s past ensure that it is at best a rewarding and memorable one.
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