After the Fire A Still Small Voice
By Evie Wyld
Published by Jonathan Cape
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Set in eastern Australia with its dark trees and blinding light, where the land is old but its wonders are still wet
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Book Review
I have to confess, I’ve had a love affair with this book. A sweet, sun-drenched, heart-felt love affair. And I’m smitten. Evie Wyld’s debut novel slips across hard-edged themes of masculine expression, war, paternal relationships and grief with such beauty and ease that it feels like she is already an old hand. Intensely sensory images lace the narrative: superbly sugary descriptions of cake baking are smelt and tasted; stale beer and fag ash of the pub scenes linger on the pages; the saltiness and scorching sun of the East Australian beach sear through the text; and the horror and stench of festering flesh turn the stomach in the depictions of tropical warfare.
But perhaps most compelling and vivid are Wyld’s leading men- Leon, his father (an immigrant from Eastern Europe who is never named) and Frank. Father, grandfather and son are bound together in a legacy of unspeakable trauma that is not only passed down the generations but also to the women that they love. There is a rawness that is buried deep under layers of bravado but which still pervades, and which threatens to crack and weep at any point.
Still, there is immense beauty- in the wonderfully subtle periphery characters, in the contrasting delicacy and harshness of the landscape and in the strong undercurrent of emotion that pulls together and pushes apart the central characters.
(review by Alice Ingall)
