Customer Reviews

After the Fire, a Still Small Voice: A Novel

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(18)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Quite an ambitious debut novel for this Australian writer. I like her prose style and her ability to create a sense of atmosphere in the story.
Remember that old saying about the sins of the fathers being visited upon the children? I think this story shows how the WOUNDS of the fathers are passed down to the sons through the generations.

The story is set in Australia. Chapters alternate between Frank and his father Leon, although the story covers three generations, including Leon's father as well. Frank's story takes place in current times. Dumped by his girlfriend and estranged from his father, he goes to live in an old shack near the sea that belonged to his grandfather. He battles his inability to "get his life together" and tries to make some sense of the long-term anger he has directed at his father.

The father Leon's story is told from his long-ago boyhood up through his service in Vietnam and the mess his life became upon return from that war.
Leon's parents were Dutch Jews and came to Australia when their own country became hostile to them in the 1930's during Hitler's rise to power. Leon's father was proud to serve his adopted country in the Korean War, but he came back utterly broken inside and unable to function in the world. This set Leon up to be essentially alone in the world as a teenager, hurt and lost and confused by his parents' behavior. When he is later conscripted and sent to Vietnam, he comes home broken inside just like his father and is unable to be a proper father to Frank.

This is not a fast-paced grabber of a book, but Evie Wyld really captures how old hurts are carried down within a family. She does it quietly and steadily, without a lot of drama or flash. And it's also a nice way to learn a little more about life in Australia and the attitudes of the people there.

This is, by far, one of the best books I have read this year. It is written in a poetic, character driven narrative by an author who appears much wiser than her years.

The story is a multi-generational dynamic of men in a family - men who have gone to war, are prone to violence and find it hard to use words to discuss their feelings. Instead of words they use alcohol, violence and avoidance.

Leon's father is a baker in Australia who signs on to fight in the Korean War. When he returns he is not the same. His post-traumatic stress disorder creates constant fear and anger in him. He leaves his family and Leon's mother follows after him, leaving Leon alone to run the bakery when he is just nineteen. Leon is shortly thereafter conscripted into the Vietnam War where he sees atrocities and develops a propensity towards violence such that he is closed off from his wife and son, Frank.

The novel alternates between two characters and stories 40 years apart - the story of Leon and that of his son Frank. As the novel begins, Frank has just been left by his girlfriend because of his aggression and violence. He goes to live in the country in a small bungalow that belonged to his grandfather, Leon's father. There he finds work and friendship though his life is fraught with fear - fear of what is lurking in the waters and in the cane fields. He is also afraid of the fear that constantly lurks in his heart. He drinks too much and feels the weight of his anxieties at every turn. As the novel opens we also learn about Leon, Frank's father, working in a bakery 40 years before with his father. The family is close and the art of baking is passed on lovingly from father to son until Leon's father goes to war and comes back isolated, frightened, and unable to connect with others.

Leon, like his father before him, returns from war a lost soul. His wife dies young and he turns to drink. He finds it nearly impossible to raise his son Frank in any way that requires intimacy or rational planning. He is not even able to pack a lunch for Frank. One lunch pail contained a pair of sardines without an opener and a pair of socks.

In the backdrop of Frank's narrative, there is a story of young girls disappearing from the area and being killed. This adds to Frank's fears as he has befriended a neighbor girl, Sal, who is seven years old. He fears for her.

I found the early descriptions of Leon and his father working in their bakery to be beautifully wrought. Evie Wyld writes with a loving, perspicacious and brutal tongue. She is a writer to watch and I hope to read more of her work soon.

This quiet, utterly compelling story belies the rage and violence lurking under the surface of the two main characters, Frank and his father, Leon. Their interwoven stories, told through a series of flashbacks, make for fine, sometimes disturbing, reading.

After an acrimonious split with his girlfriend, Frank retreats to the primitive shack by the ocean where his grandparents spent the last years of their lives and where he and his parents vacationed. It has no electricity and no running water, but its isolation offers a kind of bulwark against his demons, and he makes friends with his neighbors and their strange young daughter, Sal. Interspersed with his story is that of his father, which is inextricably linked to that of his own father, Roman, who went off to the Korean war and returned a broken man. When Leon is conscripted during the Vietnam war, he learns firsthand about the same kinds of forces that destroyed his father, and after he returns, they wreak similar havoc on his life and, by extension, on his son. Like voyeurs, we watch as two earnest, likable young men are transformed beyond recognition by the circumstances they are thrust into, even as they never entirely lose their humanity. It is the wages of war that constitute the underlying theme of the book, and how they continue to reverberate down through the generations. For one character, there is redemption, for the other, the outcome is not so clear.

Evie Wyld is an extraordinarily gifted writer, with deep compassion for her characters and the ability to conjure up wonderfully evocative and original imagery while keeping her readers turning pages. More than once I stayed up later than I'd intended while reading this book, savoring the language and eager to see where the narrative was headed. It is a testament to her skill that she never overplays her hand: The subtlety of the narrative acts as a counterpoint to the often unsettling and occasionally horrific events that it recounts. I admit that some of the Australian slang eluded me, and I'd have preferred resolution for a number of unexplained elements. (What, e.g., was scritch-scratching in the cane, or was Frank imagining it, and what is a Creeping Jesus?) But this is a haunting book that will stay with me for a long time. I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys literary fiction and isn't afraid to follow along where a masterful writer takes you.

This is a very fine novel which demonstrates the effects of the violence of war (Korea and Vietnam) on three generations of Australians. We're offered some descriptive letters from Korea and actual war scenes from Vietnam, but it's really the physical and emotional violence which these men bring back to Australia after the wars which is the subject of the book.

I enjoyed both the physical locations and the human characters. The language is very evocative and drew me deeply into every scene, but the unknown Australian words and phrases did occasionally push me back out while I tried to translate them into more understandable terms. Some are quickly learned--a chook is a chicken, a grommet is not a ring of metal but a youngster--but others left me wondering.

The title is one of several related phrases which occur in the novel--After the wind . . . , After the earthquake . . . , a series which perhaps indicates a place of peace to be found for the characters after passing through all the turmoil. But the omnipresent violence (in war, between man and woman, among coworkers, to oneself, between species, and the apparently random murder of a young girl) may also be the result of a voice, not still, not small. Which voice will the main characters ultimately hear? I recommend you read this novel and listen for yourself. I believe you'll be hearing the echoes long after you turn the last page.

Evie Wyld's debut, "After the Fire, a Still Small Voice," is an impressively lyrical novel about loss, family, and ultimately survival. Interweaving two connected stories set decades apart, Wyld has structured an unusual multigenerational family narrative in which the principal characters parallel one another without really sharing the same space. With elegant prose, Wyld's style really evokes a sense of rural Australia--and it's this wild and unsettled place that helps to evolve and rebuild both protagonists as they confront the demons and mistakes of their respective pasts.


Infused with much sorrow, "After the Fire" is an incredibly subtle story. As Frank escapes the city to understand a relationship that has soured, he settles in an abandoned beachside cottage from his family's past. Forty years earlier, Leon is working in a Sydney bakery, dealing with a father scarred by the war, and looking for his escape. When called to Vietnam himself, he inexplicably finds himself following in his father's footsteps. In the course of the story, both men must confront their violent natures and make some kind of sense of their damaged lives. It turns out that they share the same blood and, in alternating chapters, much of the same confusion and hurt.

Frank and Leon are complex and intriguing characters, and Wyld's poetic voice makes this a haunting tale. I enjoyed both stories and the fact that they intersect but are never obvious is a terrific narrative device. I'll use the word subtle again, for in other hands, this tale might have been a little "sudsier." However, what I admired in the work--and I did admire "After the Fire"--kept me slightly at a distance as well. With no major revelations, the novel comes to a quiet conclusion. Realistic, yes, but I fear some reader's might expect a larger emotional payoff. "After the Fire" ends in a very understated manner, much as it began, with only minor character shifts to punctuate the book's underlying theme. And maybe I'm a barbarian, but I missed a little "oomph" that would have made this one of my favorites. Ultimately about a 3 1/2 star experience due to a bit of emotional detachment--which I'll round to 4 for the quality of the prose.

There are times you finish reading a book and are just so stunned by its incredible beauty you have trouble putting your thoughts into words. That's exactly how I felt about 'After the Fire, a Still Small Voice.'

Wyld tells parallel stories of two generations in a family prone to devastating depression, consoled by too much love of the bottle. Both main male characters serve in wars, and both return with severe post-traumatic stress disorder. One strikes out at the woman he loves; the other becomes a shell of the man he was.

As for the female characters, they remain more in the background, and are more acted upon than acting themselves. Their dealings and reactions are somewhat muted, but the tale is told through the minds of the two male characters, so it's not as if the women are intentionally slighted. In fact, it's the two men and their treatment of the women they love that's so often center-stage.

Leon, the son and second generation, and his story dominate the book. His experiences in the war are given first-hand, and his complete nervous breakdown the centerpiece of the story. The reader comes to sympathize with him, even with all his faults, and he truly pulls at the heart.

To say this is among the best works of contemporary literary fiction I've read would not be a stretch. I can hardly think of ways to enthuse about it that don't sound cliched. With some books that's the way it is. They touch you to the core, and the writer's prose is heartbreakingly beautiful. There aren't words to describe writing so moving, save the word "perfection," but I'm afraid that one's been thrown around so much it has little meaning.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Its depiction of love and loss is drama of the highest achievement. If this wins no awards I'll be shocked. It's deserving of the highest accolades. It moved me to my very soul.

I envy those yet to read it for the first time. You cannot come away from it unmoved.

Frank has returned to his childhood playground, a beach cottage near Queensland, to sort out his life after a devastating breakup, a relationship that inevitably ended when he became physically violent with his girlfriend. He loathes what he did, and runs to hide in a place that he thinks will comfort him. Once there, memories begin to eat at him, becoming so real that he turns his head and alerts to their arrival.
He can't relate to his new violent streak, and tries to analyze what has happened since his mother's death that turned him. Violence would have been more appropriate, more expected, from his father or even his grandfather, both veterans of brutal warfare in Asia. As the novel continues, the narration explores the experiences of both of those men in war and at home.

It's oversimplified to say that war changed them, and Wyld doesn't take us down that well-worn path. Rather, what makes this story complex is how it changed everyone else. Wives and girlfriends alternate between comforters and enemies, their every action subject to the random and unpredictable moods of their men.

" Some fellas, they make the women lonely. Maybe it doesn't apply to you, mate, but maybe that's why you're here"

Frank sorts through his memories while being befriended by a small girl and her pet carrot. A missing teenager and a grieving couple complicate his life while his coworkers rail against the Aboriginal natives that reside in the community. All the while his memories and fears creep up on him though he tries to ignore them. At one point, he makes a conscious decision to rid himself of tangible items to remove the memories that go with them:

"Makes things easier having less stuff. See, if I keep them I've got to find a place to put them in - probably in a box or something so they don't get broken...And when you start to get older that sort of thing gets to be more of a problem."

This novel focuses on the intimate details of these men and their lives in a setting of urbanization and change. Wyld describes subtle gestures and inner thoughts flawlessly, and invents these entirely new flawed characters like none I've read before. Her writing style reminds me of Tim Winton (my favorite author), with its focus on the Australian bush and seaside with their colors and plants and weather. An unexpected sweetness is found mixed in with the brutality of war. A really enjoyable story that makes me eager for her next book.

This is my favorite book from the past year, and perhaps the past 5 years. Wyld's quiet, yet poignant book focuses on three generations of Australian men and their relationships with war. The grandfather becomes defined by his role as a soldier fighting in Korea. The son's life is turned upside down by his experience in Vietnam, and the grandson struggles to make an identity for himself despite having fought in no war. "After the Fire" deals with the psychological horrors of war and the veterans' inability to integrate back into society. The book is incredibly visual, capturing the beauty and baroness of Australia's landscape, which serves as a backdrop to this haunting, tender story. I recommend this novel highly.

In this beautifully written and highly descriptive novel, we bounce between the stories of Frank and his father Leon, both bakers, both angry, and both driven into solitude. We also hear the story of Leon's father (who opened the bakery in the first place), and understand that three generations of men have been broken on the same wheel of alienation, drinking and depression. Not an easy tale.

But we are told this story in the most beautiful language imaginable. This can be a painful read, with its graphic depiction of soldiers in Vietnam and the aftermath of PTSD, and its portrayal of men wrestling their demons--flashbacks of wartime, "Jesus in the sugarcane," the knowledge that you can and will be violent to those you love. But the story is tempered with women, their presence, compassion, occasional sexual mercy, and their gift of children. The growth of Franks' friendship with a child named Sal is especially moving because of the suspense that grows right alongside it.

Very highly recommended.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It is a bit dark and haunting, yet a bit redemptive. The juxtaposition of the two main characters - father and son - kept things interesting from chapter to chapter.

I read this at the same time I read Bill Bryson's In a Sunburned Country, and I believe Evie Wyld found a way to take the reader into the essence of Australia, over a series of decades, from urban Sydney to the rural bush. The scenes were quite vivid in my mind.

I noticed on the author's website that she received complaints about the language. The first complaint was about swearing. Yes, there was swearing in the book, but not extensive or swearing for the sake of just having bad words in the book. I thought it was realistic for characters who have difficult lives. The second complaint was from an American wanting the book translated from Australian to American. This is nonsense. I'm American and I had no trouble following the book. Really, it doesn't hurt anyone to learn a few sayings from the rest of the English speaking world (and it was far more understandable to me than my last attempt to reading Faulkner!). Here's a hint though: it helps to Google "Spiders of Australia" in the early chapters. Why not learn something while enjoying a novel?

Finally, I have to say as a male reader that Ms. Wyld has a good handle on the male psyche. Her male characters displayed some fairly stereotypical brutish behaviour, but instead of this behaviour being presented as parody, it was explained through context and background with compassion and sensitivity.