Book Club - Evie Wyld’s The Echoes

Final Draft - Great Conversations

Evie Wyld is the award winning author of five novels including the 2021 Stella Prize winning The Bass Rock.

Max waits in the London flat he shares with Hannah. He’s had little to do but wait since he died. He’d never given much consideration to being a ghost and even still it’s not living up to the hype.

Max’s non-corporeal existence is giving him a view into all the things Hannah never told him during their relationship though. Her life before, her life in Australia was always closed to him but now there’s a lot that Hannah must grieve.

The hook for Evie Wyld’s new novel works on multiple levels.

For starters Max isn’t a terribly convincing ghost. Early in the novel he confesses that he probably wouldn’t have believed in himself if he weren’t currently the one doing all the haunting.

Max’s existential irony is further compounded when it becomes apparent that this will be something of a mutual haunting. Even as Max tries desperately to harness some kind of spectral energy to reach out to Hannah he will discover aspects of their shared life together that he was unaware of.

The power of stories; told and hidden lies at the heart of The Echoes.

Hannah and Max have built their life together after Hannah fled her old life and her family back in Australia. Kept afloat by a photo of a grandmother she barely knew, taken in front of a house on a London street, Hannah will seek to escape into a life she feels she might have had were it not for the unfortunate circumstance of migration.

Hannah feels her life could have been better had her family never moved to The Echoes. Their story plays out on land that was once a so-called school for Aboriginal children. When Hannah was growing up she learned the euphemisms but now she appreciates they were stolen from their families.

Their stories haunt the land untold even as Hannah’s stories haunt the apartment she shared with Max.

The Echoes is masterfully told over alternating chapters of then and now.

Max’s impotent haunting skates painfully close to our collective experience of lockdown (much of the novel was written while Wyld was in London lockdown with her partner) and as such Max’s experiences wax and wane between the tragic and the hilarious.

There is something for all of us in Max’s pent up navel gazing and engrossing study of the local spider. He is at times hapless and at others haughty; a foil to the other men who have occupied Hannah’s life.

The men of the novel are better at causing pain than witnessing it. Much like the ground where Hannah grew up there is more buried than the surface might suggest.

Hannah’s story is one of loss and reconciliation. Where Max is confined to the apartment she is stuck in the life she lived in Australia and how her attempts to escape it prevent her from ever reconciling with herself.

Wyld’s prose allows the reader to occupy this space with Hannah and Max, feeling both their loves and losses. An apartment’s not a large space but Wyld fills it with the lives that fill it and this transports the reader out across time and the world.

The Echoes is a novel about trauma and the ways we deal with or avoid it. As she did in The Bass Rock, Wyld reminds us that we are not alone in time but that we must look to the stories that have come before us to understand our place.