Review of After the Fire, A Still Small Voice by Evie Wyld

[Blogger's own copy, Vintage pb, £7.99]

I saw Evie at a bar in Peckham once- it’s the sort of place where people often share tables. She was talking to her companion about writing and an upcoming radio interview. When she left the bar I asked her friend (and fellow Goldsmiths’ classmate) if she was famous and he said, “she will be”. We had a quick chat about writing and I made a note of her name. This was the middle of last year, I think, and he, of course, was right. Evie is the recipient of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and she was shortlisted for the Orange Award for New Writers among others.

I guess I was intrigued by Evie not only because of the coincidence that day but also as she’s half Australian. I wanted to see what she would write about- and, given that she grew up on both continents, whether her version of Australia would differ from my own (having not arrived in the UK until I was 28). It’s narcissistic I know but there are so many reasons one wants to read a particular book aren’t there?

After the Fire, A Still Small Voice is the story of three generations of the Collard men. Two out of three men served in the war- the young Leon in Vietnam, his father in Korea.  The latter is a baker, who having emigrated with his wife from Holland, teaches his son from a young age to fashion the sugar figurines for wedding cakes.

Out of Leon’s paws came a crumbling mess, a mix of nose and hat, of shoe and skin that ran together from the heat of his palms, blending grey in the middle. Out of his father’s hands a tiny sculpture, a person in a pleated dress, with a nose like a blade, grasping her wedding handkerchief, thin as a leaf, perfectly able to stand on her own two feet.

Leon’s mother is a shadowy figure, the woman who calls him “chicken” and takes epic-long baths in the evenings when her husband goes off to war.

In the next weeks, Leon would come across his mother staring into the open refrigerator, hanging there as though something unexpected had been put inside, the eggs replaced with light bulbs.

Of course, when his father returns from Korea he is altered and an adolescent Leon is left in charge of the bakery while his parents sort out the chaos of their lives. Then of course, he is off to fight his own war in Vietnam.

But this is primarily the story of Frank, Leon’s only son. Set in the present, the novel begins with Frank’s flight to a seldom-used family holiday shack, a move precipitated by a relationship collapse in the city. His days are spent fishing and working on the wharf and also befriending a neighbouring family who are haunted by their own ghosts.

… and the man beamed with brilliant white teeth. He had the look of a young boy dropped into a grown man’s body. The skin of his face was salt-rubbed, his eyes red and bright from the sun.

As we read on we see some of the issues from Frank’s past- the reasons for his fierce independence and his violent tendencies. And when another girl goes missing in the small town that Frank has fled to,  we feel somehow that Frank is involved.

I cannot recommend this novel highly enough. The prose is exquisite and the characterisation impeccable. I was moved to tears at times (and not just because I’m homesick!).

Evie has managed to create a thing of beauty out of the ugliness of our everyday lives. Lives hidden behind the picket fences, verandahs and shopfronts. Out of the violence and pain and squalor she fashions a story of hope and grace. Unforgettable.

For a taste of Evie’s writing, here is an autobiographical account of a childhood illness written recently for the Observer: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/jun/27/evie-wyld-once-upon-a-life-toddler-coma-nightmare

Review of ‘Legend of a Suicide’ by David Vann

[Reviewer's own copy]

I follow quite a few “book people” on Twitter and there has been a lot of chatter about this title over the past few months. Sometimes that can really put me off a book (or a film for that matter) but I succumbed eventually and bought my own copy.

The subject matter is necessarily bleak: depressive father takes his life aboard his fishing boat,  ‘”his boots slathered with the dark blood of freshly caught salmon.” Jim Fenn is survived by his ex-wife, his son Roy and daughter Tracy. It is Roy’s story that resonates throughout the novel as he fleshes out the events leading up to his father’s death and the aftermath. But this is no linear narrative and in fact, it was only when I came to the middle section of the “novel” I remembered that it is a collection of short stories about the same events told by the two protagonists. And no it isn’t that simple! Suffice to say that Vann plays around with his unreliable narrators, time sequences and so on. The ‘Sukkwan Island’ sequence is at the novel’s core and its tale of father and son surviving for months on end on an uninhabited island with limited resources is harrowing and relentless in its bleakness. But somehow there is beauty and a startling wisdom about depression and neuroses and loneliness.  Vann’s characters are selfish and damaged in the main but they are also remarkably real and the language can be beautiful:

“I touched these hides, also, forgotten by my father but watching him, feeling a child’s portion of regret, desire, longing, my father’s longing. If only a life could be bent into the shape of another’s, momentum diminished.”

and

“Watching the dark shadow moving before him, it seemed as if this were what he had felt for a long time, that his father was something insubstantial before and that if he were to look away for an instant or forget or not follow fast enough and will him to be there, he might vanish, as if it were only Roy’s will that kept him there.”

and finally:

“Memories are infinitely richer than their origins, I discovered; to travel back can only estrange one even from memory itself. And because memory is often all that a life or a self is built on, returning home can take away exactly that.”

Overall it’s a difficult book to describe but it left me aching but somehow satisfied and grateful to have read it. It is certainly the type of novel that gets quickly under your skin and becomes compulsive!

Read David Vann’s short story writing tips here.