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kingarooski's review against another edition
4.0
What can I say about a book that had me gripped in alternate chapters and skimming the text in the others? Leon's story was the one I wanted more of and the one I couldn't wait to read. Frank's story is, to me, bit more boring and dull with predictable experiences of the "angry young man".
When this book first came out, many book bloggers RAVED about it. And it is a good book, but I'd really have preferred just Leon's story, told in uninterrupted prose. It would make for a shorter book, but a more interesting one. The four stars that I think this book deserves shows just how much I found Leon's experiences fascinating.
When this book first came out, many book bloggers RAVED about it. And it is a good book, but I'd really have preferred just Leon's story, told in uninterrupted prose. It would make for a shorter book, but a more interesting one. The four stars that I think this book deserves shows just how much I found Leon's experiences fascinating.
krobart's review against another edition
3.0
See my review here:
https://whatmeread.wordpress.com/2022/06/29/review-1882-after-the-fire-a-still-small-voice/
https://whatmeread.wordpress.com/2022/06/29/review-1882-after-the-fire-a-still-small-voice/
mikewa14's review against another edition
4.0
A lovely but complex book. Whilst I couldn't put it down, I never fully engaged with the two main characters Frank and Leon. Several unanswered strands in the story though it felt that they were unanswered by accident rather than design. Some of the phraseology was odd - I wasn't sure if this was meant to be Aussie slang or just sloppy editing. That said all in all this was an impressive and enjoyable book!
full review here
http://0651frombrighton.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/after-fire-still-small-voice-evie-wyld.html
full review here
http://0651frombrighton.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/after-fire-still-small-voice-evie-wyld.html
nicmacc's review against another edition
3.0
I have read alot of books about Women and their lives being ruined and them struggling through trying to get on but this one was about men - generations of men who struggled with the mental anguish after war. In parts sad and others funny, sometimes the way in which the story was interwoven seemed confusing to me at times but interesting at the same time if that makes sense. I was amazed to find out that the author is English. She has definitely spent alot of time in northern Australia; she painted the landscape beautifully and the descriptions of the Australian way of life, the people and the language she captured amazingly.
bookishannie's review against another edition
5.0
Beautifully written with sentences and phrases that you have to re-read because they perfectly capture the mood or echo a thought you have had.
A sad and beautiful book about loss, the intergenerational impact of war and on finding your own way in the world.
A sad and beautiful book about loss, the intergenerational impact of war and on finding your own way in the world.
caffee's review against another edition
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
marthaos's review against another edition
3.0
(3.5 stars) This book, which spans three generations, tells the story of Frank, a young man who has just retreated to his grandparents’ deserted coastal house after leaving his girlfriend, his father Leon, who has taken over his family’s bakery who was conscripted for the Vietnamese War, and his European grandfather Roman, artisan baker, who volunteered for the Korean War. The book is set in Queensland, Australia, and the beautiful and rugged landscape is very beautifully described and brought alive. One can almost hear the cicadas and kookaburras as the day slowly closes in.
Frank, now alone, and whose life lacks any sort of meaning or direction, returns to his roots, where past family ghosts are brought alive, confronted and eventually provide some sort of answers to Frank, or at least a form of self-acceptance, letting go of some of the anger and repressed history which has him in a stranglehold for so long. Running away, rejecting his past completely has not served him well. It is all that is left to him to return...
As he settles back, memories, many unwanted, return to him. As he finds work and his presence becomes known among neighbours, he finds out more than he wishes to about his own past, and those of his forefathers. He arrives, fed-up of life and angry, and seems full of judgement and grudges about everyone who crosses his path. However, as the story unfolds, and possibly due in part to the physical nature of work he undertakes, coupled with the aliveness of the sea and surrounding nature, some of this anger is shed, and we witness a softening, a humility. His neighbours, who experience their own tragedy in the real-time telling of the story are central figures, with whom an unlikely friendship arises in a very roundabout manner.
As well as Frank’s story, we hear Leon’s story, from his youth learning the art of fine baking, his absent father, and his own experience of War, in huge contrast to his upbringing, and the wounds, both emotional and physical, ravaged on him and others that can’t be undone. We learn how the stories are intertwined and are opened to the inter-generational consequences of trauma as lived out by these characters.
Overall it was a very well told and well crafted story. While I admire the writing, the insight and the well-constructed plot, I found it hard to relate and empathise with Frank, and found the overall tone just too dark and unredeeming for much of the book. That said, it was a very satisfying read and I will look forward to reading other novels and stories by this talented writer.
Frank, now alone, and whose life lacks any sort of meaning or direction, returns to his roots, where past family ghosts are brought alive, confronted and eventually provide some sort of answers to Frank, or at least a form of self-acceptance, letting go of some of the anger and repressed history which has him in a stranglehold for so long. Running away, rejecting his past completely has not served him well. It is all that is left to him to return...
As he settles back, memories, many unwanted, return to him. As he finds work and his presence becomes known among neighbours, he finds out more than he wishes to about his own past, and those of his forefathers. He arrives, fed-up of life and angry, and seems full of judgement and grudges about everyone who crosses his path. However, as the story unfolds, and possibly due in part to the physical nature of work he undertakes, coupled with the aliveness of the sea and surrounding nature, some of this anger is shed, and we witness a softening, a humility. His neighbours, who experience their own tragedy in the real-time telling of the story are central figures, with whom an unlikely friendship arises in a very roundabout manner.
As well as Frank’s story, we hear Leon’s story, from his youth learning the art of fine baking, his absent father, and his own experience of War, in huge contrast to his upbringing, and the wounds, both emotional and physical, ravaged on him and others that can’t be undone. We learn how the stories are intertwined and are opened to the inter-generational consequences of trauma as lived out by these characters.
Overall it was a very well told and well crafted story. While I admire the writing, the insight and the well-constructed plot, I found it hard to relate and empathise with Frank, and found the overall tone just too dark and unredeeming for much of the book. That said, it was a very satisfying read and I will look forward to reading other novels and stories by this talented writer.
bettyvd's review against another edition
3.0
Goed! drie en een halve ster. Broeierige zielen in een broeierig landschap. Intergenerationeel trauma in dit mannenboek.
dougbrun's review against another edition
4.0
Set in Australia, After the Fire, A Still Small Voice, skillfully tracks two narratives, each struggling to escape fateful trajectories. One, the story of Leon, traces his arrival on the continent, the child of European immigrants in the 1950s. Leon, his mother and father set up a pastry shop in Sydney turning out tarts and cakes. They live well, until, that is, his father volunteers to fight in the Korean War. He returns shattered and broken, and so Leon’s world is ruptured. An irreconcilable course is set and years later Leon is conscripted as a machine gunner in Vietnam. There he realizes a nascent thirst for violence which will shadow him presumably the rest of his days. In Vietnam, and experiencing a firefight, he photographs his first kill, “he found himself wishing he’d got someone to take a picture of him with the dead boy. And then he wondered where that had come from.” A theme of descending forces drives and moves him unwittingly.
In the parallel narrative, we meet Frank, as he returns to a rundown family shack, a previous retreat for both his father and his grandfather, in rural Australia. He is attempting to put his turbulent past behind him, including a relationship to which he contributed little but violence. He plants a garden, trying to eek out an existence. He seeks solitude, but neighbors intrude, and he attempts to force common civility upon himself and bring order to his fractured life.
The novel, in alternating chapters, relates the stories of these two men, until the parallel worlds overlap in a fashion that, though not altogether unanticipated, surprises the reader and brings a semblance of explanation to the narratives. When the stories interweave, the result is significant, if not profound. This is skillful and delicate writing.
In a short YouTube interview Evie Wyld jokingly relates that her book is “a romantic thriller about men not talking.” Indeed, there is romance, though little more than suggestive. And there is a slight inference of the thriller, particularly when a young local girl goes missing. But Wyld is being self-effacing in throwing out the cliche. “Men not talking” is a loaded phrase and suggests deep currents and subtlety, both of which she conjures up and dishes out in full course. There is a scene, for example, where Frank, taking a swim, is pulled unawares to sea. Afraid of what dangers lurk in the deep, panic rises as he struggles to shore when a shark appears, its fin visibly tracking him. “Frank floated on his back...Something bumped his arm. He raised his head and saw that he had drifted clear out of the bay and there was something in the water with him. After swallowing a mouthful, he felt for all his limbs and found them still there. A fin appeared a few feet away, not a huge fin, but still a fin and it didn’t look like a reef shark. It hung in the water, oddly still, waiting for him to make the first move.” The metaphor is successful and deftly delivered without beating the reader over the head with symbolism. There is danger to the murky depths and these men are trying to get out of the current.
It, danger, lurks not only at sea, but in the fields where it watches quietly, or so Frank fears. He frequently stares into the cane field at night, uneasy that something is lying in wait. Like war-torn Leon, Frank is in danger of being eaten alive by the life he has been delivered and struggles to escape its consequences. It is an ancient theme, as the book’s title, drawn from the King James Bible suggests. The biblical verse continues, “O Lord, take away my life; for I am not better than my fathers.” Can we out-swim that which we’ve inherited? Or is destiny, in this case violence, an indelible seeping stain? Wyld explores this question with stark prose that is, like the landscape described, at once beautiful and bleak. She punctures her writing with grace notes of description which render the characters, so starkly drawn, animated and full. For instance, Leon’s mother in the bakery kitchen: “His mother whisked egg whites so that the muscle on her right arm stood out like a stick of butter.” And, later, in school, Leon “felt his own body, a sluggish weight, pale and thick, a rock with a wooden shell.” Such writing sings and puts into sharp relief the dark nature of the world being described.
These men are haunted. The landscape is haunted. There is much that is bleak and desperate here, but it does not overwhelm the book, such is the skill at which these lives are revealed, the linage of violence and struggle defined. Wyld addressed this quality in a recent interview. “I’m interested in the idea that it’s not the person who is the brute,” she said, “but that the things that happen are brutish.” Even darkness well rendered can be a beautiful thing. I am encouraged of late at the quality of work of the new generation of writers. Evie Wyld is a Grantas New Voices of 2008 author and well deserving of the recognition. I look at her and wonder at how so much wisdom and talent can reside in one so young and fresh.
In the parallel narrative, we meet Frank, as he returns to a rundown family shack, a previous retreat for both his father and his grandfather, in rural Australia. He is attempting to put his turbulent past behind him, including a relationship to which he contributed little but violence. He plants a garden, trying to eek out an existence. He seeks solitude, but neighbors intrude, and he attempts to force common civility upon himself and bring order to his fractured life.
The novel, in alternating chapters, relates the stories of these two men, until the parallel worlds overlap in a fashion that, though not altogether unanticipated, surprises the reader and brings a semblance of explanation to the narratives. When the stories interweave, the result is significant, if not profound. This is skillful and delicate writing.
In a short YouTube interview Evie Wyld jokingly relates that her book is “a romantic thriller about men not talking.” Indeed, there is romance, though little more than suggestive. And there is a slight inference of the thriller, particularly when a young local girl goes missing. But Wyld is being self-effacing in throwing out the cliche. “Men not talking” is a loaded phrase and suggests deep currents and subtlety, both of which she conjures up and dishes out in full course. There is a scene, for example, where Frank, taking a swim, is pulled unawares to sea. Afraid of what dangers lurk in the deep, panic rises as he struggles to shore when a shark appears, its fin visibly tracking him. “Frank floated on his back...Something bumped his arm. He raised his head and saw that he had drifted clear out of the bay and there was something in the water with him. After swallowing a mouthful, he felt for all his limbs and found them still there. A fin appeared a few feet away, not a huge fin, but still a fin and it didn’t look like a reef shark. It hung in the water, oddly still, waiting for him to make the first move.” The metaphor is successful and deftly delivered without beating the reader over the head with symbolism. There is danger to the murky depths and these men are trying to get out of the current.
It, danger, lurks not only at sea, but in the fields where it watches quietly, or so Frank fears. He frequently stares into the cane field at night, uneasy that something is lying in wait. Like war-torn Leon, Frank is in danger of being eaten alive by the life he has been delivered and struggles to escape its consequences. It is an ancient theme, as the book’s title, drawn from the King James Bible suggests. The biblical verse continues, “O Lord, take away my life; for I am not better than my fathers.” Can we out-swim that which we’ve inherited? Or is destiny, in this case violence, an indelible seeping stain? Wyld explores this question with stark prose that is, like the landscape described, at once beautiful and bleak. She punctures her writing with grace notes of description which render the characters, so starkly drawn, animated and full. For instance, Leon’s mother in the bakery kitchen: “His mother whisked egg whites so that the muscle on her right arm stood out like a stick of butter.” And, later, in school, Leon “felt his own body, a sluggish weight, pale and thick, a rock with a wooden shell.” Such writing sings and puts into sharp relief the dark nature of the world being described.
These men are haunted. The landscape is haunted. There is much that is bleak and desperate here, but it does not overwhelm the book, such is the skill at which these lives are revealed, the linage of violence and struggle defined. Wyld addressed this quality in a recent interview. “I’m interested in the idea that it’s not the person who is the brute,” she said, “but that the things that happen are brutish.” Even darkness well rendered can be a beautiful thing. I am encouraged of late at the quality of work of the new generation of writers. Evie Wyld is a Grantas New Voices of 2008 author and well deserving of the recognition. I look at her and wonder at how so much wisdom and talent can reside in one so young and fresh.