Rain, dogs, and dread stalk Evie Wyld’s pastoral dystopia with a twist

Louise Jury admires prize-winning, Granta novelist Evie Wyld’s disturbing new novel about a woman shepherd with a secret past
Evie Wyld Evie Wyld at the Review book shop, Peckham Rye, south east London, Britain - Sep 2012 Evie Wyld at Review book shop, where she works part-time.
Richard Saker / Rex Features
13 June 2013

All the Birds, Singing
by Evie Wyld
(Cape, £16.99)

Evie Wyld is the part-time bookseller in Peckham who proved a giant-slayer with her acclaimed first novel. After the Fire, A Still Small Voice beat books by the Orange Prize-winning writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Booker victor Aravind Adiga to win the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, awarded for the best work of literature by a UK or Commonwealth writer under 35, raising high hopes for what Wyld would do next.

The answer is All the Birds, Singing, a strange, disturbing and admirably original story about a woman shepherd apparently seeking to escape her past, told in tightly controlled flashback. We meet Jake Whyte — whose masculine name is not explained — as she tends her sheep on a bleak, unspecified British island with only Dog the dog for company. Something is attacking her flock, the weather is wintry, the locals hostile. Then, with a few exotic-sounding birds — the currawong and the white galah — and a deadly redback spider on the shower-head, the setting switches swiftly to Jake’s earlier life in Australia. It is a country Wyld also wrote about in her debut and which she conjures vividly.

Henceforth, chapters alternate between the harsh reality of farming in Britain, in the company of amiable neighbour Don and the curious stranger Lloyd, and going back to Jake’s formative years in Australia, revealing how she learned her farming skills, and her relationship with Otto, the controlling lover from whom she eventually escaped. The Aussie storyline is told in reverse, so that we learn that Kelly is dead before we ever meet the dog in question, and about Otto’s tin can of cash before we know how Jake came by it, all leading the reader back to the incident from which everything stems.

Throughout, there are tantalising hints of menace. What did happen to Otto’s wife, whose earring Jake finds in the woolshed and whose shoe is under the house? What caused the mysterious scarring on Jake’s back, and who, or what, is attacking the sheep?

Carefully planted clues make for a certain intrigue, though the calculation can grate. There are flashes of clever psychological observation, such as Jake’s irritation at Lloyd’s friendly attempt at housework. “It was annoying that he had moved things, and that the place looked nicer because of it.” Bodies, whether manhandling farm stock, engaged stickily in sex or prickling at immersion in hot bath water, are rendered almost palpably real.

But the eking out of the story is so controlled that the eventual disclosure of the Australian secret that lies at Jake’s damaged core comes as a disappointment after 229 pages of tension. The ending is certainly a surprise and, without giving the game away, it’s probably even more shocking in Australia. But a tiny heartwarming hint that Jake could still find happiness is left adrift in a sea of vaguely unsatisfactory unanswered questions.

I still want to read what Evie Wyld does next.

Go to standard.co.uk/booksdirect to buy this book for £13.99, or phone 0843 060 0029, free UK p&p

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