“I laugh out loud at how wonderful life is that it takes a hell of a knock like that and it’s just fine, and I find the steadiness in myself...”

Starlings, Lindisfarne. August 2021.

All the Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld

As an oddly structured novel, the book features alternating chapters from the perspective of our narrator's present (told in the past tense) and her past (told in the present tense). Those chapters set in the present progress in an even and linear fashion. Those chapters set in the past hop and leap backwards in a disconnected and disjointed way. While this is an innovative way to capture our protagonist's haphazard and traumatic past, the fragmented nature of the telling is confusing at times.

There is some evocative writing here, with those sections set on the remote sheep station and in the present particularly resonant. Other sections failed to convince, with the strange relationship with the withered Otto and the period of sex work in a port town in the Pilbara striking a bit of a dull note to my ear.

We know very little about our central character, as Wyld lets the past emerge in fragments and half-light. The one constant is a woman carrying a load, traumatised by something (or someone) and choosing self-isolation as her defence. I appreciated how the relationship emerges with the similarly damaged Lloyd, which emerges in the present in a natural and hopeful fashion. This gives the entire piece some possibility of light and redemption amidst the dark and desolate surroundings.

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 1/2

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Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it...

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There was nothing left. No reason, no conscience, no understanding; even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, good or evil, right or wrong.

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Hold me now, oh hold me now, until this hour has gone around. And I'm gone on the rising tide, to face Van Dieman's Land

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This will hurt me...

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