Review by New York Times Review
EVIE WYLD'S SECOND novel opens with its narrator, a woman named Jake Whyte, discovering one of her sheep killed and gutted. Carrion birds are feasting: "Crows, their beaks shining, strutting and rasping, and when I waved my stick they flew to the trees and watched, flaring out their wings, singing, if you could call it that." Jake shouts, "What are you laughing at?" and throws a rock at them. It's a bracing beginning for a novel called "All the Birds, Singing." The singing isn't singing: It's rasping, laughing, screeching. Some of the birds are on an island, never named, off the coast of Britain, where Jake is raising sheep, trying to outrun her past. Some are in Australia, the country she fled. Some, it turns out, aren't birds at all. The novel is set in rough, remote places, but the growing dread and terror reminded me of Daphne du Maurier, who knew a thing or two about birds. Like du Maurier, Wyld is interested in the haunting power of the past and the menace of the half-seen. Jake has ferocious arm strength and well-reinforced defenses. A bullied child and a former teenage streetwalker who's become an adept sheep farmer, she's unlike any character I've seen in fiction. She isn't a forthcoming narrator, and we don't know until the end of the book what's brought her to this damp, unnamed island. Usually narrative withholding makes me impatient, and I start thinking of Robert Lowell: "Why not say what happened?" But Wyld's concealment is artful. There are reasons for Jake's reticence, and she doesn't want to advertise her location. She wants to figure out what's killing her sheep, and why. The novel progresses in alternating chapters. The present, on the British island, moves forward in time. The past moves backward, each even-numbered chapter a step earlier in the serial trauma that sent Jake, with terrible ridged scars across her back, to this lonely sheep farm. The effect is of a mind alone in the world (except for a dog named Dog) rehearsing the possibilities and performing an archaeological dig, layer by layer, on the ruin of her own life. Wyld trusts her readers to follow her, and we know we're in Australia, in the second chapter, because the birds are different: "A currawong and a white galah are having it out; I can hear the blood-thick bleat of them. A flying fox goes overhead and just like that the smell of the place changes and night has settled in the air." The story of the past is told in present tense because the threats aren't elusive and mysterious there; they're close and immediate and physical. Jake works at a sheepshearing station in Western Australia, where a thumb-size poisonous spider shares her shower and a fellow shearer tries to blackmail her into sex. She doesn't do anything about the spider, which is always perched on the showerhead and leaves her alone. When the shearer won't, she punches him in the jaw, "and he goes down, out cold and bleeding on the floor." Her boyfriend is good and kind but knows nothing, and won't go with her, so she leaves him and her country behind. On the British island, the bored local kids are Jake's first suspects in the sheep killing, and they're likely: They gather to smoke on the road and make obscene gestures. Jake is a target, a woman who does a man's work and keeps apart. But when she meets the kids one at a time, they're just sad, and Jake recognizes the kind of kid she was. One girl works at the island's market, where the vegetables are all going bad. Jake asks her what happened to the market's broken greenhouse window, and she answers, "Dad said to say the wind blew it in." The girl has a blue bruise on her temple, and trouble counting nine oranges. When Jake sees her crossword puzzle close up, she's just coloring in the squares. It's hard to imagine these hapless kids slaughtering sheep without leaving a trace. A condescending police sergeant suggests that rogue dogs might be the culprits. "I seen a lurcher go at a fox one time, and just the force alone of the dog's snout on the fox's ribs, ripped him right open - no teeth at that point, but fox is a goner." The foxes are suspects, too, with their sharp teeth, shrieking in the woods. But when Jake sees one near her sheep, it seems too small to be a threat. What happened to the heroine is awful, and what saves her in its aftermath is work. There's also a stranger on the island, walking the bridle way in a suit. Jake hears an upturn in his accent and fears he's from Australia, chasing her down. Because something is chasing her, she just can't quite catch sight of it. And what about those scars on her back? Why does she have screaming nightmares? It's not until the very end of the book, when the last layer is excavated, that it all comes clear. One of Granta's Best Young British Novelists in 2013, Wyld grew up in Australia and in London. Her first novel, "After the Fire, a Still Small Voice," also used alternating chapters set in the past to investigate the derailing of a life. In that novel, war wreaks damage on an Australian family, the grandfather a refugee from Europe who serves in Korea, his son a foot soldier in Vietnam. "All the Birds, Singing" is concerned with Australia's history, too, but more obliquely. Jake, as a child, with an older sister and three little brothers, asks her mother: "What kind of Aussies are we? Did we come over on the boats, or did someone take us here later on?" The answer she gets doesn't delve: "Mum'd looked up from where she was struggling to get the triplets bare white arses into undies, and blew a hank of hair out of her face. 'I've been here for ever, darl,' she said and swatted one of the kids on the legs to try and get them to keep still. I'd never pushed further than that." WHAT HAPPENED IN Jake's past is unexpected and awful, and what saves her in its aftermath is work. Some of the best passages are about Jake's learning to calm the wary sheep, and the satisfaction she takes in shearing well, "like taking the skin off an orange, or more accurately like peeling a mandarin, when the skin is thick and the pith attached." She sees enough resigned acceptance among both sheep and people to refuse, herself, to be doomed. Her only friend in her street-walking days, the girl she shares a room with, says: "We've got options - we're smart. Right? Right?" Jake decides to make that true. If the novel sounds forbiddingly dark, it's not. It's swift and assured and emotionally wrenching. You won't only root for Jake, you'll see the world, hard facts and all, more clearly through her telling. There's hope at the end, and wit, and friendship. Something fiendish has followed Jake to the island, but she's also brought a searchlight gaze, like the unforgiving Australian sunshine, to illuminate the dim corners where miserable secrets lie. MAILE MELOY'S most recent book for adults is the story collection "Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 8, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
Jake Whyte, the female protagonist in Wyld's riveting second novel (following After the Fire, a Still Small Voice, 2009), lives alone on a bleak island off the British coast. A sheep farmer, Jake finds that her primary companion is her dog, named simply Dog. Trouble arises when someone, or something, begins killing Jake's sheep one by one. At first, Jake suspects local teenagers or a wild animal, but it quickly becomes clear that the entity, real or imagined, is far more mysterious. Jake's vivid tale unfolds in a double narrative. As events in her life on the island move forward chronologically, episodes from her prior life are revealed in reverse, incrementally uncovering the menacing details of her past. These include the time she spent working as a shearer at a sheep station in western Australia, a harrowing turn as a prostitute, and the traumatic events that lie at the root of Jake's perpetual transience and isolation. Jake is both haunted by the past and struggling with the present, and the intensity of Wyld's sharp novel grows as the two threaten to collide.--Strauss, Leah Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In the searing second novel from Wyld (After the Fire, a Still Small Voice), the past takes real and imagined forms, all terrifying, in its protagonist's life. Jake Whyte, a young Englishwoman, is a sheep farmer on a desolate scrap of island very like the Isle of Wight, where the author, who was named one of the best young British novelists of 2013 by Granta, spent much of her childhood. In the present, something, or someone, is gruesomely killing Jake's sheep. Her traumatic past includes a stint as a prostitute and a relationship with the creepy Otto, who ostensibly "rescues" Jake from the streets, only to turn her into a sex slave of sorts. Jake's current fears include a man in a suit who shows up on her property, and a shadowy beast that she heard going berserk in her cottage one night. Wyld's writing is as muscular as Jake, who, when spooked, drops to the floor to do push-ups. But Jake is troubled as well as strong, running from the many tragedies in her past, including one experience that left a nasty scar on her back. It is a testament to Wyld's vivid storytelling that readers will feel determined to drag themselves through her tale's more unsavory moments to its final revelation. Agent: Laetitia Rutherford, Watson, Little Ltd. (U.K.) (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Wyld (After the Fire, a Still Small Voice) has masterfully created a novel with an unusual structure that nevertheless feels natural, a dark, eerie undertone that delivers gripping suspense, and subject matter that can get grim and even hard to read yet never makes the story feel depressing. The heroine is Jake, who in the present-day arc of the novel has removed herself to a remote British island, where she tends to a flock of sheep in self-imposed isolation save for the company of a dog named Dog. The novel also has a past arc, that moves backward, building toward a climactic conclusion. From her youth in Australia, Jake carries emotional and physical pain, as evidenced by the scars that cover her back, and that hurt lurks like an evil presence, a force that stalks her even in her remote island refuge. VERDICT The intermingling of past and present story lines takes some acclimation, but trust Wyld, she will quickly draw you in; a true pleasure to read. [See Prepub Alert, 10/14/13.]-Shaunna E. Hunter, Hampden-Sydney Coll. Lib., VA (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The second novel from award-winning Australian author Wyld (After the Fire, A Still Small Voice, 2009) explores the checkered past of a self-reliant young woman, a sheep farmer. When we first meet Jake Whyte, she's tending her flock on an island off the coast of England. This is no Little Bo Peep: Jake is a tall, muscular Australian who can shear a fleece with the best of them. She's also a loner; after three years on the island, she has no friends. To understand her, we must delve into her Australian past, which Wyld alternates with her English present. In a further twist, Wyld uses reverse chronology for the Australian sections. In the Outback, Jake is the only female member of a team of shearers, contract workers moving between sheep farms. Wyld is at her best capturing their work rhythms and cheerful profanity. Jake has hooked up with Greg, a good guy, but is being blackmailed by another shearer who's found out Jake is on the run. That takes us back to her time with Otto, a sheep farmer who kept her as a sex slave. Did he also cause those wicked scars on her back? Jake had met Otto when she was a hooker and he had seemed the better proposition, but it was the wrong call. At last we reach the catastrophe that gave Jake those scars and forced the 15-year-old to leave home. The tricky narrative strategy has given Jake a past but not developed a full character. Jake has little interior, and that's true too of her English incarnation. Instead of insights, we get more mysteries. What strange beast lurking in the woods is savaging her sheep? And who is the disoriented trespasser she shelters? Wyld has ordained a permanently dark life for her protagonist, a stubborn fate that offsets the surprises and the reader's enjoyment.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
