Max didn't believe in an afterlife. Until he died. Now, as a reluctant ghost trying to work out why he is still here, he watches his girlfriend Hannah lost in grief in the apartment they shared and begins to realize how much of her life was invisible to him. In the weeks and months before Max's death, Hannah was haunted by the secrets she left Australia to escape. A relationship with Max seemed to offer the potential of a fresh new chapter, but the past refused to stay hidden. It found expression in the untold stories of the people she grew up with, and the events that broke her family apart and led her to Max.
I could have read an entire novel dedicated to Max and Hannah’s quotidian life in London — in its best and most lyrical moments, The Echoes documents the messy, divine business of being alive ... Wyld’s sharp story of living doesn’t need traumatic climaxes to make its point. The time to enjoy the love we have is now.
The title of Wyld’s new novel, The Echoes, is presumably meant to sound wistful and haunting. Actually it’s more a case of cacophonic reverb, an untenable proliferation of both narratives and traumas ... Multiple secrets, artificially withheld over hundreds of pages: could there be a cruder way to generate tension? Or a more tiresome objective correlative than the overused self-harm trope? These days characters seem to whip out a razor blade at the first hint of a feeling or a memory. But, as is always the case with Wyld’s novels, some of the writing is genuinely, frustratingly good ... Quite simply, there is far too much going on here for us to get to know the characters well enough to feel for them.
