In her fourth novel The Echoes , Evie Wyld orchestrates multiple narrative points of view through the intriguing figure of the echo. Love and trauma resound and rebound throughout. Persistent echoes are present in bodies, memories, photographs and places.
The Echoes is at once the name of a striking, if haunted, property in the remote northeastern goldfields of Western Australia on the lands of Wongi people, and a description of the novel’s strange modes of reverberation: the partial repetitions that become apparent as it moves between past and present, living and dead, hidden and revealed, rural Australia and suburban London. Review: The Echoes –Evie Wyld (Vintage) The most famous account of the mythical figure of Echo comes from Book III of Ovid’s Metamorphoses . A mountain nymph famed for her beautiful voice, Echo uses her vocal powers to distract Hera from Zeus’s infidelities.
Hera’s revenge is to curse Echo so that she can no longer form an original sentence of her own, but can only repeat the last portion of the speech of others. Echo thus becomes unable to woo the self-absorbed Narcissus , whom she loves unrequitedly; she can only ineffectively repeat his phrases. She eventually pines away and dies, though her voice persists, held in the rocks and mountains of her home country, amplifying and replaying the words of others.
The central romantic relationship of Wyld’s novel is quite different, but the trope of the echo is pertinent. The story of Max and Hanna.