All the Birds, Singing - Evie Wyld

A tense and moving plot which explores deeper meanings behind the haunting past

pp.229

Publisher: Jonathan Cape, 2013

Evie Wyld is a fearless writer. The first sentence of All the Birds, Singing reads, ‘Another sheep, mangled and bled out, her innards not yet crusting and the vapours rising from her like a steamed pudding.’ She is unafraid of violence, of the horrifying, of monsters and what they represent, and yet much of her prose is lyrical, poetic, beautiful. Gorgeous in places. This dynamic novel contains the subtle and it contains the heavy-hitting punches of a viscerally disturbing piece of fiction.

Her technique is to have the running narrative pursued by flashbacks of the past which move backwards in time, slowly and heart-achingly, digging deeper and deeper, unveiling more and more. In this respect, the plot is very skilfully drawn out for us, much like a genre fiction novel. Cliff hangers aside, though, this is a novel with literary aspirations, a tense and moving plot which explores deeper meanings behind the haunting past, the past which never leaves us.

Jake Whyte lives alone on a farm in the British Isles, tending to her sheep and denying herself the comforts of human interaction. The reason for this slowly becomes clear as we are dipped into her past again and again until we understand exactly how she has got to where she is. It is a past of prostitution, bullying, homelessness and sheep shearing. As something begins killing off her sheep in the night, Jake’s backstory circles in on the true purpose of her solitary existence.    

This method of telling the story backwards gives us the sense of the protagonist becoming more and more naïve. In developing the character, Wyld works towards a kind of anti-development, or a backwards development. As such it seems, to the novel’s detriment, that the denouement, the big secret in Jake Whyte’s past that she is running from, is a bit of an anti-climactic revelation as it works against the image of her up to that point. However, the author cleverly maintains our sympathy in Jake despite what takes place, which one can tell from the very beginning of the novel is going to be a difficult task. It also makes us consider how a moment of madness can change our lives forever. Yet the redemptive quality of the novel is striking.

All the Birds, Singing is about isolation, inner demons and desperation. It is also funny in places. It is a novel full of empty spaces that sit hauntingly amongst the narration, allowing the reader to fill them.