Thursday, 19 June 2025

The Echoes, or Literary Responsibilities (13th)

I was about to launch into telling you how much I love Evie Wyld (reviewed here and here) when I went to her wiki page and followed the link the this article in Overland (an Australian literary magazine.) Do writers have a responsibility to address social issues? I think the article's author nitpicking about local plants or the ability to make a living making goat's cheese is irrelevant, but her assertions about Wyld's, shall we generously say, 'skating over' of the issues around, for example, the removal of aboriginal children from their families is a fair criticism. It was a thing, there in the background of their lives and the story, but it is not addressed in any specific way. But does a novel have that responsibility? I don't know. The article left me disconcerted, which I suppose it should, having to face up to the fact that we are all complicit in these wrongs but unable on a personal level to be able to atone or repair. I felt that Evie's characters were teenagers, wrapped up in their own lives without the level of awareness that would make it part of their story. A story, after all, can only be about so many things. The book is very much about a sense of belonging and the accidents of fate that make our lives the way they are, in the place they are. 

A photograph of her grandmother as a child outside a London terrace preoccupies Hannah to the extent that she takes herself back there from Australia, seeking something that I am not sure even she understands. I was not sure about the dead boyfriend, it was a device I suppose that allows you to look in on her, and to tell the back story. We hop back and forth in time, telling life in London and life in small town Australia, not quite outback, but pretty remote. Cue spiders and somewhat dysfunctional family, who muddle along together. It's all about the hidden stuff, the untold tales and the squashed dreams.

Here Uncle Tony (mum's brother, who lives in the garden), a hint of stuff unspoken:
"In bed in the camper van, Tony holds his goat and thinks about how the earth is as big as it is. There is so much weight and he should just start up the camper in the night and drive away and never see anyone again, let his sister live the rest of her life. He cannot do what Kerry has done, make a space for cotton wool under the skin, bolster the past with a new version of himself. Perhaps he doesn't have the imagination. How did his mum do it, in the naked knowledge she was one of the bad guys? The shiny patch of skin on his wrist that never goes, the way his finger ache in cold weather, become numb and creaky. The slip of the blood through the veins of his wrists. He's only understood recently why they never asked for help from a neighbour or teacher - the shame, and worse than that for him. The love for his mother.
He cannot stop himself from putting a little something away at every meal. And the ants always come. Who can blame them for following their nature? when you thought about it, everything that happened in the world was just the natural way of things - you didn't look at a termite mound and think how the termites had ruined the earth with termite-made structures. They did what they did. We're just doing what we do." (p.124-125)

Here Hannah, having had an abortion without telling Max she was pregnant:
"'Hi', I whisper, and he blinks and turns his face away. I imagine he is the product of a line of cats born here and related in some way to the one Natalia's grandfather holds in the photograph. Decades of kittens, some drowned in a bucket, others born in a drain, some wild, some loved, fat housecats, a hundred or so dead on the road, some eaten whole as babies by foxes. And this sturdy creature with a fat tom face, the spit of his ancestor, held grumpily by the old man. My hand moves to my stomach. No one will stand in front of my house in thirty years and wonder about my life inside of it. They won't stalk into the night and feel the pull of another time, another country. The cat looks quickly up the other end of the street and I look too, the end where the street lights stop. I come into myself, cold in an overcoat, in the quiet of the night, hiding in a doorway, and nobody in the world - other than this cat - knows I'm here. When I look back the cat has gone. A wind blows down the street, and I start to walk briskly towards the main road, spooked, like the safe part of the night is over, like I've accidentally swum out beyond the shark net. I try not to make ripples as I walk." (p.138) 

Here Max, looking out of the flat window, muses on our irrelevance and the transience of life (how philosophical):
"The blue and silver balloon in the tree outside the window, torn. The girl who let go of it will watch her father die of cancer; if she's lucky that will be after university. If she's really lucky it will be after she has kids and they meet him and the grief is passed on to them in a way they won't understand. And then she will die and her kids will watch that, and understand suddenly, and still this scrap of silver and blue will catch rays from the sun, be swallowed and then shat out by birds or choke them and gleam out of their rotting stomachs." (p.182)

You can critique her political awareness all you like but you can't fault her writing. Still loved it. 

Stay safe. Be kind. 

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