In The Echoes, Max is a ghost, living in the house he shares with girlfriend, Hannah. Before he died, Max didn’t believe in ghosts – yet now that he is one, things seem to have changed. As he witnesses Hannah’s life after his death, Max sees the past unravel. Hannah’s long-buried family secrets are revealed as the novel moves between past and present. Max’s before and after are punctuated by Hannah’s peripheral familial moments and relationships that work their way into the narrative.Â
The novel examines life and death through the lens of family secrets that linger from the past. Secrets that stretch so far back, it feels as though they were forgotten for a long time, but it is their relentless desire to resurface that continues to haunt Hannah throughout the novel.
From a house in England to the memories of Mr Manningtree, a belligerent neighbour in Hannah’s childhood, and the examination of racist policies against Indigenous Australians, at first, everything seems disparate and disconnected.
At times, it feels as if these are separate vignettes that could have had their own story about that person and their impact on Hannah’s life. The skill in creating this tension and the desire to know more gives the novel a gravitas that eventually makes the reader question what they know about human interaction, human nature and the afterlife.Â
In holding back and drawing a veil of secrecy across some of the past, hinting at it or only revealing snippets, Wyld’s book has a sense of real life and its implications. There are things the reader is not privy to, though the clues are often there to put together, giving this literary novel a sense of mystery amid the ghosts and memories.
Each section is narrated differently – the “After” sections are narrated by Max’s ghost, with the “Before” sections narrated by Hannah in the build-up to Max’s eventual tragic death – both in the first person. The rest are in the third person as they flit between various stages in Hannah’s life and explore the family secret that she was so desperate to escape.
The Echoes is tinted with pain stemming from generational trauma and familial trauma that spans decades and countries. This serves to prove that perhaps we cannot really escape our past, no matter how hard we try. It’s filled with the ups and downs of life that everyone experiences in some way and the different ways people deal with the hand that life has dealt them.
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This is a novel of layers, starting with the name. The Echoes is the name of a place in the novel, but also reflects the echoes of life that stay with us even when we want to leave them behind. It examines the idea of an afterlife as another kind of echo that reverberates and never leaves the last place its life form inhabited. It feels starkly different from other novels that revolve around life after death in the way it examines death’s impact as well as the secrets that stay with us unbidden.Â
The Echoes, Evie Wyld
Publisher: Vintage Australia (Penguin)
ISBN: 9781760895297
Format: Paperback
Pages: 240pp
Release Date: July 2024
RRP: $34.99
