Review by Kevin Brown
Evie Wyld’s latest novel takes place in three different time periods, which she refers to as Before, After, and Then. The Before and After section focus on Hannah and Max, a couple living in England, with the Before and After referring to Max’s death. The Before sections come from Hannah’s point of view, while Max—as a ghost—is the centerpiece of the After chapters. The Then sections go back to Hannah’s childhood in Australia, showing what led her to England and to who she currently is.
Those Then sections relate Hannah’s childhood in The Echoes, a place that exists on the graveyard of what used to be a “school” for Indigenous children where the white family running the institution abused, beat, and sometimes killed them. That past echoes through the experiences of the white family that now live there, as well, especially in Hannah and her sister Rachel’s Uncle Tone (short for Anthony).
Some Australian writers and thinkers have criticized Wyld’s handling of this section of the novel, critiquing her knowledge of Australian culture, but also in her supposed equating of the two types of trauma. I read the novel, especially the title, as an attempt to show how the whites are often oblivious to or indifferent to the suffering that has come before them, focused only on their own suffering, not as people for the reader to emulate. However, I’ll also admit my shortcomings in both perspective and knowledge.
In the Before and After sections, Hannah and Max’s relationship struggles to develop as fully as it could, largely because of the trauma Hannah endured before coming to England. While it’s clear they love each other, Hannah hasn’t revealed much about her past, even hiding a decision to have an abortion recently in their relationship. Characters’ decisions echo throughout time, as the novel also meditates on grief and loss, as Max’s ghost hovers in their flat for years after Hannah leaves, seeing her only one more time, understanding all they have lost.
The Echoes by Evie Wyld. Alfred A. Knopf, February 2025.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrites
