Ghosts must be back in vogue as The Echoes is the second novel I’ve read in recent months narrated, at least in part, by someone trapped between this world and the next. The spectre in question, Max, was a creative writing teacher who now spends his days floating around the apartment he once shared with his partner Hannah while observing her tentative new relationship with his former friend, an echo itself of the 1990 movie Ghost, although if the novel has a true cinematic predecessor, it’s probably the more ethereal Truly Madly Deeply.
Whenever any movie or book features a ghost, the question is generally, why is he or she still hanging around? What have they left unresolved that’s preventing them from making their way towards the white light? That question is raised early on when, at the wake, a student remarks: “I just think it’s such an undignified way to go. It’s quite embarrassing.” Which, of course, offers a sense of intrigue as the reader wonders exactly what took place. (Max himself can’t remember and worries that it might be some Elvis-like humiliation.)
The novel opens with a moment of pain as Hannah aborts a baby without having revealed her pregnancy to Max. Although there have been moments when she’s hoped he might propose to her, there have been just as many when she’s wondered whether their relationship has run its course. Their arguments are typical of long-term couples, small irritations that blow up into more complex feelings of being unheard or unseen, but there is love there too.
Max is not the only narrative voice in the book. There is Hannah, an Australian exile who has come to England and deliberately cut off all communication with her family, and an omniscient narrator, who tells us the story of Hannah’s childhood and the reasons for her estrangement from her parents.
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While each part is beautifully written, there isn’t always a sense of cohesion between the three. The contemporary sections, reflecting the occasionally tempestuous rapport between the lovers, her reaction to his death, and his confusion about how to escape the limbo in which he is stranded, work well. Equally, the parts set in Australia are engaging and Evie Wyld – who won the Miles Franklin Award, Australia’s highest literary prize, for All the Birds, Singing, and is herself a product of both England and New South Wales – writes about Hannah’s “bogan” family with great insight, particularly her childhood with her sister Rachel, the pair coming of age around the same time and comparing their changing bodies while eyeing up boys at the waterside.
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Conflicts simmer between their parents, uncles and aunts but, while this is a relatively short novel, the stories of some of these extended members of the family sometimes feel surplus to requirements.
One can admire a novel and respect its author while simultaneously feeling frustrated by its structure and, for me, this was one of the problems with The Echoes. I struggled to connect the Australian and English sides of the narrative, which felt like two different books with a single connecting character. This isn’t helped by the fact that Max has not only never met any of Hannah’s family, but never even spoken to any of them.
‘Evie Wyld is a writer of substance, whose mixed heritage has served her well in her storytelling, allowing her to explore the world and its people from very different perspectives’
Wyld, however, is a skilled writer. At one point, Max remarks that “to be dead is to take a seam ripper and gently lift up the top layer, blow underneath to make space and then disappear inside of it”, an observation that I read and reread many times to draw out its full meaning, much as one might do with the lines of a poem.
Fifteen years ago, I was on the jury for what was then called the IMPAC Award, and is now the Dublin International Literary Award, and we shortlisted Wyld’s debut novel After the Fire, A Still Small Voice for the prize. The Echoes is her third novel since then and each has been well received. She is a writer of substance, whose mixed heritage has served her well in her storytelling, allowing her to explore the world and its people from different perspectives.
The Echoes will surely add to her growing reputation, but I would have enjoyed it more had the novel displayed more internal cohesion, the sections reflecting and resonating off each other rather than feeling so independent. Those echoes might ultimately have made it more fulfilling.
