- All the reviewers of this novel refer to its 'gothic' flavour, which is misleading. There are some 'ghosts' or spirits but they're not important. It's quite a contemporary novel of male/female relationships and, principally, the ugliness of masculine power.
- Some reviewers have also commented on, and praised, the deliberate withholding of details as the novel progresses, and the slow, dribbling, revelation of family relationships. The reader is thrust into the murkiness of it all. I found this aspect annoying. The constant introduction of new characters is confusing, and it's multiplied by three because there are three narratives over three different time frames, connected by thin threads.
- Why the deliberate obscurity, this mystery? It adds virtually nothing. A dramatis personae would have been helpful (which I've provided below).
- It's a very English novel in many ways. Upper middle class, stiff upper lip, snooty, and a disdain for simple clarity.
- Reviewers have also praised the writing. To me it was ordinary and charmless, like many of the characters. (‘But the money lasted only a grain of salt’). Some paragraphs are virtually incoherent. Apart from Ruth, the principal character, the women are annoying. Maggie is as mad as a cut snake and Viviane loves getting ‘drunk’. Just one glass of wine seems to make her ‘drunk’. Too much contemporary fiction indulges in this trope, as if there is no distinction whatsoever between 'slightly inebriated', 'tipsy', and 'drunk'. Virtually all the characters of this novel, set mainly in Scotland, drink Scotch whiskey, morning and night, like it was water. And sherry, and gin, and wine.
- The focus is on tangled, unsatisfying, man/woman relationships. Female sex with men is aggressive and rough. Rape is common. The men are abusive, deceiving and manipulative, most of the time. The women are victims of masculine power. The men behave as if they own women’s bodies. It’s very ugly. Violence seems to be their primary mode of expressing emotion, like apes. Murder is also part of the fabric, where raw animal emotion overcomes reason and decency.
- Did I enjoy this novel? Not really. Will it stay with me? Yes.
- Here's what I wrote about Wyld's Miles Franklin Award winning novel All the Birds, Singing six years ago:
Wyld's book is a spare and beautifully written story of a young woman's flight from horror, pain and abuse. In a real sense it's a testimony to the ugliness of men. We are spared no lacerating detail of the harsh, brutal treatment handed out to the woman by the cruel and violent men she encounters in country Australia as she flees from the consequences of a tragedy she caused as a reckless 15 year old in Darwin. Eventually she finds her way to a peaceful Isle off the coast of England where she lives alone and tends sheep.
But the dark beast of horror still pursues her.
(This is the Dramatis Personae for the three time periods, which readers will find helpful:
1. Present day: Viviane, Katherine (sisters), Michael’s daughters; Bernadette is their mother; Maggie (acquaintance). Deborah, real estate agent.
2. Aftermath of WW2: Ruth ('Puss'); Betty (housemaid), her sister Mary and Mary’s 11 year old daughter Bernadette; Alice (Ruth's sister) and her husband Mark; Mother+Father; Ludwig (dog, now dead); Antony (brother, killed in the war); Peter Hamilton (husband); his two children (boys Michael and Christopher); his former wife and the boys’ mother Elspeth;
3. Late 18th century: The Widow Clements (Charlotte); Joseph the son, and narrator; Agnes his sister; Cook; Father (Callum); the girl Sarah.)
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