... wondrous and disturbing ... There are quite a number of plot points in this book, and a great deal of structural ingenuity ... beautiful prose—observant, melodic, imaginative ... The book’s spirit feels most anchored in Ruth’s section, though Viviane’s is vital and provides most of the book’s oxygenating levity ... The message it leaves you with—down to its expertly chilling final line—is certainly dark. But in delivering it, Wyld consistently entertains, juggling the pleasures of several different genres. There’s something alchemical in the way that, with hardly a clumsy step, she draws on elements of eerie natural horror...and the supernatural...alongside any number of other motifs ... if, toward the end, I felt that the novel’s spectral elements simmered on a heat that could be lowered by 20 percent or so, that’s simply personal taste. Wyld essentially pulls it off, the way she pulls off nearly everything.
... in the hands of a more conventional writer, the effect would be repellent. But throughout Ms. Wyld’s fiction, which transcends the category of either horror or crime, such visceral images, always sparingly employed, have a mesmerizing force that is instantly felt and eerily sustained. Whether the location is the Australian outback (“After the Fire, a Still Small Voice”), rural England and Australia or coastal Scotland, this author seizes her readers with the swift grace of the wild predators she often describes, then sets them down on terrain so richly imagined it seems to fill the senses ... an expertly layered, quietly suspenseful novel that alights now in the past, now in the present, to reveal—as delicately as that blowing sand might—a family’s most intimate secrets and crimes ... a graceful serpentine pattern woven by a consummately sly storyteller ... Some of the finest scenes in “The Bass Rock” are those that capture the mentality and manners of the English gentry ... Ms. Wyld stages a plot twist as inevitable as it is shocking, a maneuver at which she excels ... these lurid digressions, for all their potency, seem more symbolic than profound, unlike the modern homicide—a crime elliptically yet chillingly evoked—that explains the hideous suitcase found on the seashore in the opening scene ... an appropriately muted—and terrifying—conclusion to a fervent yet shrewdly restrained novel in which an evil left to our imagination is as shocking as an open wound.
I would like to say I enjoyed this novel, but enjoyment would seem to be a singularly inappropriate response to it. It is a kind of lure, and it deals with ideas of luring in quite remarkable ways. Wyld’s previous two novels were both artfully constructed...This book is as equally ingenious, if not more so. The virtue of this kind of dislocated narration is that it allows the novelist to withhold information, to make the reader speculate on possible connections and how the different parts of the story interlock. It is a high-risk strategy: too neat and it seems like clockwork, too many loose threads and it seems ill-conceived. But here it is done with a very judicious blend of revelation and mystery ... It takes no small amount of skill to juggle such a structure. Through it all, the Bass Rock of the title glowers, eerily close and distant at the same time ... Wyld lures the reader into what might have been any other split-time frame, slightly quirky novel and then lets rip. As the men lure the women, the writer lures the reader ... What is very clever indeed is to use the gothic as part of this bold book. In effect, it is as much as disguise as a predator’s balaclava. The gothic allows for a certain comfort zone, that horrors are supernatural, that the nasty thing in the woodshed is a ghost or a goblin. No, the nasty thing is a human man. There is a decent man in the book, and he is a lush, and berates himself for not being a murderer. Wyld has constructed an elaborate trap. It is not about millennial angst, or post-war stifled politeness, or historical witchery. It is about the war that seems unending ... With each novel, Wyld gets better and better. I will personally snub anyone who dismisses this book as a #MeToo novel. It is – importantly – written with dreadful clarity.
... a complex, searingly controlled catalogue of male violence against women ... The elegant patterning of the novel’s structure and the delicate links between the three narrative threads stand in contrast to the brutal material ... It is, inevitably, a furious and painful reading experience: by page 10 alone, we’ve encountered a woman’s dismembered body in a suitcase, a disquisition on misogynistic advertising and a threatening stranger in a car park. But the novel is also psychologically fearless and, in Viviane’s sections, bitterly funny. Wyld is a genius of contrasting voices and revealed connections, while her foreshadowings are so subtle that the book demands – and eminently repays – a second read ... There are many more characters and connections in this dense, complicated book, which is a gothic novel, a family saga and a ghost story rolled into one, as well as a sustained shout of anger.
Like Sarah Waters and Attica Locke, Hannah Kent and Celeste Ng, Evie Wyld writes novels that are fast-paced page-turners with meticulously crafted narratives. There is an awareness of the relationships between personal conflicts and social issues that creates a reverberating tension in her storytelling. Expansive themes — victimization and power, isolation and independence — are encapsulated in characters’ experiences so the social commentary is embedded in the plot ... The historical setting is captured with a light touch so that the focus remains on the emotional landscape. Wyld emphasizes enduring aspects of human nature, displaying but not overstating the relevance to present-day readers ... engages readers’ senses from the outset. Sometimes Wyld selects atmospheric and readily recognizable details...Even these possess a rhythm that subtly buoys the novel’s relentless pacing. Often the details specifically reflect a dimension of the story, encapsulating vulnerability and raising questions about agency ... Wyld walks the line between generalization and specificity deftly, so that readers cannot escape the stench of it all. The Bass Rock is a close study of the visceral, the ephemeral. Even the walk-on characters fundamentally support the novel’s themes ... a concatenation of tender horrors ... Readers ought not to be so satisfied at the end of The Bass Rock, with such a stench and so many sorrows, but Evie Wyld entertains while she provokes. Readers ought to be happy.
Wyld’s previous, award-winning novels have been largely set in Australia. While she moves into more ambitious territory with the different time sequences of The Bass Rock, the pull of that country remains ... Dealing with the consequences of abuse, estrangement and male violence, Wyld is unhesitatingly brave in her writing, especially on fear, disgust and skewed power. She has an instinctive understanding of the interchangeability between humans and nature that can border, thrillingly, on animism, as in the work of her contemporaries Sarah Hall and Sarah Moss ... Domestic violence, or the threat of it, floods the pages of The Bass Rock. It is best realised in Ruth’s sections — Wyld’s delineation of the era is cut-glass perfect: its clipped emotions, inherent sexism, automatic silencing of and putting away of 'difficult' children and women ... Sarah’s sections of the novel are less successful, despite giving a rich framework to subsequent generations of women performing acts of righteous vengeance against oppressors ... While at times clumsily overwhelming in its relentless summoning of the living and the dead, Wyld’s intentions are clear; and her prose shines, even as it devours.
... grim, superlative ... As we cut back and forth between them, the web connecting these stories emerges in steadily drip-fed detail ... a brutal portrait of male violence, as unchanging down the centuries as the coastal rock of the title.
... a great deal of fight ... Wyld is not in the mood to be timid about how these women’s fates are at the mercy of men, whether that’s through witch hunts, infidelity, abuse or oppression. The breadth of wrongs come thick and fast ... The narration swaps between the women constantly, and chapters are not named, so it’s easy get disorientated. An intention perhaps, from the talented Granta Young Novelist of the Year, to catch you off guard and emphasise how time presses repeat in different forms. Wyld is often praised for her lyrical prose, and The Bass Rock is most certainly a continuation of this form.
... complex, rich, challenging, and [Wyld's] longest book ... a jumpy, scattered novel, where the reader has to do a certain amount of work to fit the pieces together, and even then a complete picture is not always achieved ... offers a universal history of subjugation and oppression – but specifically focusing on male violence against women. Viv’s story is especially strong in this regard ... The fact that most of the male characters in the book are dangerous may be grist to the mill for the #NotAllMen brigade, but that would be to complain that the only Germans in Raiders of the Lost Ark are Nazis. The point of the book is to highlight it, not hide it ... However, not all the narratives are equally effective. The scenes in the story of the 'witch' are short and feel more like mood music than integrally connected to the other threads. By contrast, Ruth’s story is so wide-ranging and features so many strands and characters that I found them hardest to engage with. The fact that it’s in the third person – the other two are first person narratives – adds to the sense of distance ... It’s Viv’s story which really shines and carries the book’s emotional weight. She’s a complete, troubled but sympathetic character and could drive a novel on her own. The violence in her life, and which runs through the book like veins in marble, means that even at its most vivid and gripping, The Bass Rock can be a grim read. Escape is possible, it seems to say, but only en route to the next act of destruction.
Sarah’s story, told through another’s eyes, feels far less cohesive, dusting the novel with an unnecessary folkloric sheen ... Is re-enactment the antidote to our 'vast and infinite' amnesia? It’s a question that haunts the art of the #MeToo era: can (must) we hurt women to prove how women are hurt and hurting? It is telling that the novel’s most potent moments come not from its scenes of violence but from the cell-deep anticipation of them; not from a ruined body in a suitcase but a desperate mother packing that same suitcase in the hope of escape. The Bass Rock lacks the nuance of the author’s previous work (most notably, the wonderfully sinister All the Bird’s Singing (2013). Sometimes you need the blunt force of a rock, but for all the novel’s ferocious and bloody reckonings, it is as a testament to survival that it carries weight.
Steeped in grief and teeming with ghosts ... With a restrained (but sustained) rage, Wyld explores the physical violence, emotional abuse, misogyny, and other harder to define aggressions women experience at the hands of men. The novel’s ambitious structure—which falters a bit during interspersed thematic vignettes—offers a kaleidoscopic portrayal of women’s suffering; certain themes, visuals, and feelings echo throughout the generations, which creates a sense of collective trauma. Wyld is particularly adept at describing the physical anticipation of danger; a sense of foreboding hangs over the novel like a shroud ... Time and time again, Wyld artfully proves the female body knows (even if the mind won’t accept) the dangers lurking all around ... A haunting survival tale that lingers long after the last page.
