Writing with assurance and just enough embedded clues to help us understand what she is doing, Wyld ramps up the tension with this dual-time-flow structure. That complicated structure should be a distraction, but in Wyld’s hands, it is not.
The chapters alternate between Jake’s present life on the island and her previous life in Australia the island story moves forward while the Australia story progresses backward. One evening, she closes the kitchen curtains and turns up the radio “to drown out the skittering noises of leaves moving up the stone path.” When Jake rescues an injured pigeon, she squeezes it too hard, and its head goes slack. A sheep’s final cry rattles Jake’s bones and “fades out into a gurgle.” A redback spider sits atop a shower head, raising one leg as if to ward off the water’s chill spray. In a robustly anti-Disney approach to nature, Wyld’s animals signal and sometimes magnify the sense of foreboding. Wyld uses language that is purely gorgeous, even - perhaps especially - when underscoring dread. Surrounded by animals - a dog called Dog and her sheep, killed mysteriously one by one - she finds as little comfort in the natural world as she does in human companionship. A low, steady thrum of dread suffuses Evie Wyld’s second novel, “All the Birds, Singing.” It’s there right from the opening sentence: “Another sheep, mangled and bled out, her innards not yet crusting and the vapours rising from her like a steamed pudding.” The sheep belong to Jake Whyte, a surly woman living alone on a British island.
0 kommentar(er)
