After the Fire, a Still Small Voice

✍ Scribed by Evie Wyld; Evie Wyld

• Publisher: Vintage
• Year: 2009;2010
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 190 KB
• Category: Fiction

✦ Synopsis

After the departure of the woman he loves, Frank struggles to rebuild his life among the sugarcane and sand dunes that surround his oceanside shack. Forty years earlier, Leon is drafted to serve in Vietnam and finds himself suddenly confronting the same experiences that haunt his war-veteran father. As these two stories weave around each other—each narrated in a voice as tender as it is fierce—we learn what binds Frank and Leon together, and what may end up keeping them apart.

Set in the unforgiving landscape of eastern Australia, Evie Wyld’s accomplished debut tackles the inescapability of the past, the ineffable ties of family, and the wars fought by fathers and sons.

From the Trade Paperback edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. One of Granta 's New Voices of 2008, debut novelist Wyld chronicles the stories of two Australian men and the shards of trauma that have made up both lives. Frank and Leon live parallel lives: the narratives begin with young Leon's father heading to the Korean War, and, 40 years later, with an adult Frank holing up in a decrepit beachfront shack. Leon's father returns from Korea badly damaged, having been in a prison camp, and soon runs away, with Leon's mother giving chase. Later Leon is drafted and faces in Vietnam horrors similar to those that traumatized his father. Meanwhile, in the present day, Frank is starting over after his girlfriend leaves him. Making do in the family shack, he befriends his neighbors and threads together a passable existence in spite of remembered tragedies, anger at his shadowy father and a spate of local children gone missing. The two narrative threads stay separate until the final pages, and, refreshingly, their connection isn't overplayed. At times startling, Wyld's book is ruminative and dramatic, with deep reserves of empathy colored by masculine rage and repression. (Aug.)
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From The New Yorker

Frank last visited his family’s shack, on a Queensland beach, as a gas-huffing teen-ager, battered by his mother’s death and his father’s abusive neglect. He returns an alcoholic man, “the bloody feel of some bastard terrible thing swimming inside him,” having lashed out at his girlfriend until she left. The shack has served as a retreat before: for Frank’s grandfather, reeling from the Korean War, and for his father, who holed up there after serving in Vietnam. The stories of these wounded forebears are layered into Frank’s tormented recovery, trauma seeping from one man into the next. Wyld has a feel both for beauty and for the ugliness of inherited pain. The mood is creepy—strange creatures in the sugar cane, grieving neighbors, a missing local girl—and the sentiment is plain: “Sometimes people aren’t all right and that’s just how it is.”