All the Birds, Singing, by Evie Wyld
It’s been a while since I’ve been able to properly update the blog – too busy at work. That also means I’m reading terrifically slowly, inching my way through Edith Grossman’s Don Quixote translation a few pages a day. Thankfully, since I’m crawling through Don Quixote at the speed of a mobility-impaired snail, it is at least a very good translation and an absolute pleasure to read.
Anyway, enough about Don Quixote for now, because this entry is about another very good book (seamless segue there, absolutely seamless) – Evie Wyld’s second novel titled All the Birds, Singing. Here’s the opening paragraph:
Another sheep, mangled and bled out, her innards not yet crusting and the vapours rising from her like a steamed pudding. Crows, their beaks shining, strutting and rasping, and when I waved my stick they flew to the trees and watched, flaring out their wings, singing, if you could call it that. I shoved my boot in Dog’s face to stop him from taking a string of her away with him as a souvenir, and he kept close by my side as I wheeled the carcass out of the field and down into the woolshed.
I love that opening. Immediately I’m uneasy – another sheep, so not the first; mangled and bled out, so probably not an accidental death; there’s a total lack of sentiment both in the reaction to the body and in the fact that the narrator’s dog is named simply Dog. That’s a lot of information packed into one paragraph.
On top of that there’s some lovely description there. The innards not yet crusting, it’s unpleasant but arresting and easy to picture. The vapours rising as if from a steamed pudding, which as well as being evocative and disquieting (mixing imagery of food and death) tells the reader that it’s probably cold. I love too the crows, “shining, strutting and rasping”, flying away but not too far, singing their raucous song.
The “I” in that quote is Jake Whyte, an Australian woman now living on a remote Island in the UK. She farms sheep, but something is killing them. Perhaps a wild beast, perhaps local teenagers, perhaps someone or something else. She has scars on her back, unexplained, and she doesn’t mix much with the other farmers. She lives alone, with Dog, but she fears she’s being watched.
Jake isn’t really an unreliable narrator – there’s nothing to suggest she lies to herself or has many illusions. She isn’t though wholly reliable either. Something very ugly has driven her to her present seclusion, and while it’s certain she feels under threat, besieged, it’s not at all clear that she’s actually in any danger. The local police think she spends too much time alone for her own good, and there’s a definite suspicion that the shadows she jumps at are ones she brought with her. Still, something’s killing the sheep…
Chapter two ducks backwards in time, to when Jake was still in Australia working on a sheep farm in the outback. She went there fleeing something, but one of her workmates has found out her past. He tries to use whatever he’s learned to blackmail her for sex. She breaks his jaw with a punch and soon she’s fleeing again. Whatever’s driving Jake, it’s serious.
As a quick aside, it’s nice to have a female protagonist whose reaction to being menaced in that way is to deck the guy threatening her. Part of Jake’s problem though is that she’s much better at responding to physical challenges than she is to emotional ones.
The novel continues in alternating chapters. The ones in the UK go forward in time in the usual way, each chronologically not long after the last. The Australian chapters though go backwards in time, each showing a key moment in Jake’s history.
The first Australian chapter then is the last in a sense, showing how she came to leave the outback sheep station. The next Australian chapter is earlier, showing how Jake became a sheep shearer but fell out with the man who’d later try to blackmail her. The next shows her arriving at the station – I won’t say where she was before that or what drove her to end up somewhere so remote.
What all this means is that Jake is a woman in hiding. She hid in the Australian outback, but her past found her there. Now she’s hiding on an island where nobody could ever find her, unless of course somehow they have.
With all this I’m making it sound like a crime novel or a thriller. It’s not at all though. It’s as readable as a crime novel, but it’s very much literary fiction. There’s a lot of very careful construction here. References made in the UK sections are explained as the Australian sections slowly excavate Jake’s past. Jake’s situation, past and present, slowly unfolds as Wyld carefully walks that very fine line between maintaining suspense and manipulating the reader.
The risk with this kind of novel is a sense of artificiality. Obviously all novels are artificial, but many (most) novels don’t want to make their artifice too obvious. Here we have two narrative streams one going forward, one back, each shedding light upon the other as well as plenty of symbolism and careful narrative device. It’s an origami novel, and that raises a question about whether it’s too neat, too evidently constructed.
The answer to that question is no, Wyld pulls it off. The reason she does so is the depth and precision of her description. I believed her outback, I believed her island, I believed more to the point in Jake. There’s a beautifully clean matter-of-factness to her prose which shows the essence of what she’s describing while avoiding seeming overwritten. It’s that which saves the book, and more than saves it, makes it good.
This is a book full of terrible things. The slaughtered sheep; Jake’s terrible past; the indifferent violence of the natural world and the casual cruelty of the human; a powerful and horrible scene in Australia where Jake hits a kangaroo with her truck causing it so much suffering she ends up having to kill it with a crowbar to spare it further pain. Jake’s seclusion brings her natural environment to the foreground – isolated from humanity she lives a near-animist existence in which the life around her seems filled with intent and Jake is but one wounded animal among others.
For all that horror and pain though it’s not a bleak book. The descriptions of the natural world are beautiful, and the arrival of an alcoholic drifter who comes to Jake’s farm starts to draw her back from the world she’s constructed for herself – the claustrophobic isolation of her own history.
For a novel like this it always comes down to the writing. Get that right and the rest should follow (get that wrong and it’s painful). Wyld gets it right. This is an oddly difficult novel to quote from, in large part because of its subtlety of structure, much of the effect is lost if taken away from context. It’s full of small yet telling observations. One I couldn’t resist including here comes from when Jake first sees Greg, a sheep shearer that the reader knows later became her lover, shearing a sheep: “Greg’s sheep are sleek and clean with no grazes, like they’ve been buttered …”
I haven’t bought Evie Wyld’s second novel yet, but I shall before the year’s out and it’ll be high on my to read pile. In a way that’s the ultimate test for any author, does one wish to read more by them? I want to read more by Evie Wyld.
Two reviews which I found helpful when I was deciding whether to read this or not were that of David Hebblethwaite at his blog, here, and Simon Savidge’s blog Savidgereads which I don’t link too nearly as often as I should. His review is here. Finally, in the interests of full disclosure I should say that I got my copy directly from Evie Wyld – she had a couple spare and gave them away on twitter to whoever asked first and I happen to follow her account and got lucky.
Filed under: Crows, English Literature, Wyld, Evie Tagged: Evie Wyld