Half in jest, Evie Wyld has described her highly garlanded first book After the Fire, a Still Small Voice as ‘a romantic thriller about men not talking’. The same description more or less fits this second novel, although here a reticent woman takes the place of three generations of silent men. All the better: we expect men (in fiction at least) to be strong silent types, while women protagonists tend to err towards chattiness and disclosure. In this as in other regards Wyld is a writer who reconfigures the conventions of storytelling with a sure-footedness and ambition which belie her age. Even her name is good, suggesting an untamed paradise and man’s exclusion from it, which is one of her themes, too. It is no surprise that she has been included on every possible shortlist of talented young authors to look out for. Evie Wyld is the real thing.
The closest cousin to All the Birds, Singing is Iain Banks masterly first novel, The Wasp Factory. As in The Wasp Factory, the central character’s isolation is underlined by placing the action on an island; here, too, the narrator has ghastly secrets to bear and is (to begin with, at least) of uncertain gender. Once we discover that the narrator, Jake, is a woman, it is all the more surprising to learn that she is a solitary farmer. Her spartan life on a windswept chalk island somewhere off the coast of England is interspersed with memories of a very troubled youth in Australia, where she learnt how to rear sheep and shear them.
This is a novel saturated with the sense of menace. It is clear that a terrible darkness threatens Jake’s stability, but the source of that horror — and whether it is within or outside her — is revealed only drop by drop, over the course of the story.
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