Evie Wyld

Another sheep, mangled and bled out, her innards not yet crusting and the vapours rising from her like a steamed pudding.

Man, I love a good opening sentence. Here we have one that immediately grabs you (Another???), resonates with poetry, and, though you won’t realize it quite yet, sets up the book’s pattern of misdirection. For despite what a reading of that first sentence would lead you to believe, this is not going to unfold like a mystery novel. We are not going to have what killed these sheep ever spelled out for us. This book is about something more interesting, and far more disturbing.

Crows, their beaks shining, strutting and rasping, and when I waved my stick they flew to the trees and watched, flaring out their wings, singing, if you could call it that.

Let's not overlook the second sentence, either. The prose poetry continues, and it connects with the book's title: birds are going to be a persistent element in the story, looking down from a distance, observing (and judging?). Crows specifically are symbolic of a number of things: doom (the protagonist's back story, told backwards), trickery (the author's misdirections, including the protagonist's very name: Jake, suggesting a male), supernatural mystery (what might that dark shadow be that she suspects of killing the sheep?).

Jake is living on an unnamed (invented?) island off the coast of England, running a farm of 50 sheep... now down to 48. She has come for the isolation, running away from a past in Australia that will be revealed in pieces in alternating chapters that run back in time. She shies away from contact with her neighbors, believing that she's always being negatively judged.

The chapters of her past tease with gradually parceled out information. How did she get those scars on her back? What sort of relationship did she have with this Otto person? What happened to her relationship with, and within, her family? How did she come to be working as a teenage prostitute?

The chapters of her present, in contrast to the dry heat and sharp edges of her Australian past, are wet, muddy and blurred on her English island. A drunk man stumbles onto her property and she develops perhaps a slightly unlikely relationship with him, allowing him to move in to her downstairs and help a bit with the sheep. His past is a bit shrouded, though nothing like hers. The main focus, however, is on what is killing her sheep.

This is never revealed, we are given only clues, and is the obvious source of conjecture/confusion in reviews here. Here's my guess, and you might want to stop reading now if you're reading reviews before reading the book rather than after..

The large, shadowy presence she blames for the killings is not actually an earthly physical entity, nor is it some supernatural entity acting with agency in the world. It is a metaphor for a dark past, filled with guilt. One reason for believing it's not actually "real", besides the unlikelihood of a large unknown animal living on a small island, is that on a couple of occasions she believes it enters her house: though she doesn't ever actually see it, she hears it. But she hears it doing impossible things, like racing up the stairs - where no stairs actually exist. And when she thinks see sees it in her sheep pen and shoots at it, Lloyd tells her she hit a sheep. At the end of the novel, Lloyd believes he sees it in the woods, but then he’s another person living with dark event over his head. It is suggested, though only conjectured, that another character has seen it as well – this a young man with a troubled upbringing who began acts of arson after his mother died and recently returned from being sent to jail after his father pressed charges. So it seems to make sense that this shadow is just that, a shadow, a metaphor.

What is actually killing her sheep? Just an average, everyday fox, perhaps the one she sees lurking on the edge of her woods, with two small cubs. Lurking nightmares flung up by our imaginations, informed by our past, can be far worse than what we actually find right in front of us, today.… (mehr)

All the Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld, is about an isolated sheep farmer (Jake Whyte) who is trying to escape a past so painful she can only revisit it in screaming nightmares. The structure of this novel is ingenious: a chronological present alternating with a past that's gradually revealed in reverse. Starting with the first paragraph -- where Jake discovers someone or something has gutted one of her sheep -- the paranoia Jake feels is palpable, and you can't help but race through this book to find out why. Brilliant.… (mehr)