The Echoes by Evie Wyld review – ghosts of the past

Max, a thirtysomething creative writing tutor, has died, and now haunts the second-floor flat in London’s Tulse Hill where he once lived with his Australian girlfriend, Hannah. This is inconvenient, as Max doesn’t believe in ghosts, and yet here he is, watching Hannah grieve, “floating about like a jellyfish, my tendrils … sweeping up the lint and hair from the floor. Sometimes when I come forth I take up the whole of a room, like a balloon slotted between ribs and blown up to make a space for breath.” Notice that funny, mysterious “come forth”, and the near-violence of the simile that follows (“slotted between ribs”): this is not going to be a quirky-sad love story, all poignant memories and hard-won insights. We are in Evie Wyld’s precise and unforgiving hands, and she knows exactly where she wants to take us.

The narrative jumps largely between Max’s sections as a ghost trapped in the flat, titled “After”; Hannah’s chapters, set in the run-up to Max’s death, called “Before”; and “Then” – flashbacks to Hannah’s childhood in rural Australia. She grew up with her parents, her Uncle Tone and older sister Rachel on The Echoes, land on which a residential school for Indigenous and mixed-race children once stood. An old paddock concealed their small bones: victims of racist child removal policies that, until as recently as 1969, saw tens of thousands of kids taken from their families and either fostered with white families or sent to orphanages, missions or “training homes”. Few records were kept, but it’s known that many children died of neglect or from physical punishment, and their remains were secretly buried on site.

The fact that the school was not somewhere children were kept safe from harm is both known to Hannah and her family, and somehow not known. She swims in the creek, idolises her sister and feeds the family goats, yet an unnameable horror lurks beneath it all. Small wonder her favourite book, one she returns to again and again, features vivid photographs of shark bites and dismemberment (Wyld was herself fascinated by sharks as a child and in 2015 co-authored a graphic memoir with Joe Sumner called Everything Is Teeth ). “What will you do when the shark follows us and tries to take the rest of me down?” she whispers to Rachel late one night. Rachel’s offhand reply prefigures both girls’ fate.

In London the adult Hannah self-harms in a variety of imaginative ways, sabotages a promising writing career, refuses to talk about her family or reply to her mother’s letters, and has an abortion she doesn’t tell Max about. She has also lost touch, completely, with her sister, and the two narrative engines of the book are provided firstly by Max’s need to find out how he died, and secondly through the slow, nightmarishly unfolding story of Hannah and Rachel’s childhood, their mother and Uncle Tone’s past, and how their life at The Echoes came to what was clearly a shattering end.

The pieces of the story’s puzzle drop into place with a feeling of horror and a strange kind of satisfaction

Wyld has always excelled at tension and pace, and the scattered puzzle pieces drop into place with both a feeling of horror and a strange kind of satisfaction: oh, that’s whose face she briefly thinks she sees in the bathroom mirror. That’s why she makes lots of cups of coffee and doesn’t drink them. That’s where the tiny cube of green glass on her bedside table came from.

Nobody writes about trauma like Wyld. She does this largely by not writing directly about it, either transforming it into metaphor, or focusing only on its after effects, or both. From the creature that haunts the sugarcane fields in After the Fire, a Still Small Voice to whatever keeps killing Jake’s sheep in All the Birds, Singing and the shadowy “wolfman” in The Bass Rock , monsters stalk her pages. Her characters are circled by them, their psyches distorted by things only half-visible, their pull as inescapable as a black hole. Families are not much better; they’re rarely safe places, but resemble more the mouths of the sharks that so fascinate Hannah, packed with vicious teeth.

Yet as well as terror The Echoes is also suffused with love, from the deep bond between Hannah and Rachel to the consoling and celebratory love of female friends, and the imperfect, wavering but ultimately lasting love between Hannah and Max. It is also – and this is important – a deeply funny book: there’s Max, who “has recently decided that the thing about him is fermentation”, burping a jar of homemade kimchi; Hannah’s brief liaison with a godawful friend, the whole thing watched by Max’s ghost, who is tersely surprised to observe that the friend is circumcised; Hannah’s chaotic pal Janey and her brilliantly serious daughter, who has a habit of upending adult conversations; a scabrously excruciating comic set piece of a Christmas dinner; and Max’s ghostly war, and eventual entente , with the cat Hannah gets after his death.

The monster Hannah is in flight from is eventually revealed, and with it comes a sense of lifting the stone, finally, and looking at the terrible and unexpected thing that has been buried underneath, and hasn’t died. The adult Hannah makes sense to us at last, despite – or perhaps because of – having articulated so little of her story to us directly: a “show, don’t tell” technique that closely mirrors the effects of trauma, in which so much is expressed but often so little can be said. We learn how Max died too, and when Hannah leaves the flat he persists there, with “the moths and the damp and the dust motes … the last of our fingerprints cleaned away”. Time no longer exists for him; but eventually, miraculously, his persistence is rewarded. The last, lingering voices in the novel hint at healing – and at hope.

• The Echoes by Evie Wyld is published by Vintage (£18.99, A$34.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply