Review
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR:
VOGUE • THE GUARDIAN
WINNER OF THE 2021 STELLA PRIZE
“A wondrous and disturbing novel . . . Observant, melodic, imaginative . . . Moves from comic to deeply unnerving . . . The message it leaves you with—down to its expertly chilling final line—is certainly dark. But in delivering it, Wyld consistently entertains, juggling the pleasures of several different genres.” —John Williams, The New York Times
“The most gripping thing I’ve read in ages . . . A haunted house of a novel, as intricately built as relentlessly ominous . . . It’s that rare literary novel that will give you shudders . . . Wyld is so controlled and subtle a storyteller that her themes remain elegantly beneath the surface. What carries you along is the vivid description and an atmosphere of rising dread.” —Taylor Antrim, Vogue
“An expertly layered, quietly suspenseful novel . . . This author seizes her readers with the swift grace of the wild predators she often describes, then sets them down on terrain so richly imagined it seems to fill the senses . . . [She is] a consummately sly storyteller . . . There are unmistakable echoes here of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, not only in Wyld’s subtle depiction of a woman adrift on sinister, restless tides but also in her shrewd depiction of a ruling class inured to brutality.” —Anna Mundow, Wall Street Journal
“Riveting . . . The descriptions, at times, are so powerful that you’ll have to remind yourself you’re not on the coast of Scotland walking in the freezing rain . . . Like any good gothic novel, there is a dark old house full of noises and things that go bump in the night . . . But this is not simply a gothic novel or a catalogue of horrors, there are moments of deep tenderness and even a few good laughs . . . This is a book that men need to read; we women, we already know, but we should read it too.” —Brooklyn Rail
“Like Sarah Waters and Attica Locke, Hannah Kent and Celeste Ng, Evie Wyld writes novels that are fast-paced page-turners with meticulously crafted narratives.” —Chicago Review of Books
“Excellent . . . The Bass Rock holds more than a little in common with Kate Atkinson . . . Also easily draws comparisons to Virginia Woolf.” —Newcity Lit (Chicago)
“A haunting survival tale that lingers long after the last page . . . Steeped in grief and teeming with ghosts, Wyld’s new novel explores violence against women throughout time . . . A sense of foreboding hangs over the novel like a shroud . . . Time and time again, Wyld artfully proves the female body knows (even if the mind won’t accept) the dangers lurking all around.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“The Bass Rock is a multi-generational modern gothic triumph. It is spectacularly well-observed, profoundly disquieting, and utterly riveting. Like all Evie Wyld’s work it is startlingly insightful about psychological and physical abuse. It is a haunting, masterful novel.”
—Max Porter, author of Grief Is the Thing With Feathers
“Hard to stop reading.”
—Annie Bostrom, Booklist
“A gothic novel, a family saga and a ghost story rolled into one . . . Psychologically fearless . . . Searingly controlled . . . Wyld is a genius of contrasting voices and revealed connections.”
—Justine Jordan, The Guardian
“The modern sections feel a little like Ali Smith’s novels crossed with the TV series Fleabag . . . There’s much to admire in its little miracles of observation . . . Wyld is also wonderful at describing moments of sudden lust and violence. And she knows how to maintain suspense, what to withhold and when to reveal it—right up to the spine-chilling last line.”
—Johanna Thomas-Corr, The Sunday Times
“A multilayered masterpiece; vivid, chilling, leaping jubilantly through space and time, it’s a jaw dropping novel that confirms Wyld as one of our most gifted young writers.”
—Alex Preston, Observer (UK)
“Amazingly good. The Bass Rock will fill the air around you with angry ghosts and you will be glad to be in their company.”
—Adam Foulds, Booker Finalist, author of The Quickening Maze
“The Bass Rock is a bewitching and atmospheric novel, laced with dread. It reveals the haunted house of society, with all its echoes of damaged and extinguished lives, but is also illuminated by beautiful observation about people, and the timelessness of their capacity for both violence and empathy.”
—James Scudamore, author of Heliopolis
“A dark, gristly marvel of a novel. The Bass Rock held me in thrall from cover to cover. Evie Wyld is a gothic genius: her narrative of the violence inflicted on women throughout the centuries and the seething, female anger left in its wake left me with a deep sense of disquiet that will doubtless remain for years to come.”
—Hannah Kent, author of Burial Rites
“Written with blistering force and righteous anger, this outstanding novel will stay with me for a long time.”
—Alice O’Keeffe, The Bookseller (Book of the Month)
“Wyld is the most stupendous of writers, daring, heartfelt, explosive. The Bass Rock reminds us of all her power and brilliance, it thrums with an anger it is impossible not to feel.”
—Daisy Johnson, Booker Finalist, author of Everything Under
“Bewitching . . . Evie Wyld is exceptionally good at the gruesome . . . With great dexterity and style, Wyld illustrates how abuse forms a cycle that may take generations to break. The action moves seamlessly between the 1700s, the middle of the last century, and the recent past . . . The Bass Rock is beautifully written and its particular brand of macabre is all Evie Wyld’s own. The tension, foreboding and sense of inevitability are hard to shake off, even once the final page is turned. Its atmosphere is so powerful that you feel you need to go for a walk afterwards the blow the shadows away.”
—Cressida Connolly, Literary Review
“Evie Wyld is the author of two excellent novels but she moves up a gear with her third . . . Superbly written . . . Shockingly satisfying . . . Each of these separately lonely women are startling well drawn, yet the threads running through their lives are universal . . . The Bass Rock deserves to win prizes.”
—Claire Allfree, Metro
“Evie Wyld’s tremendous new novel, The Bass Rock, is a powerful and beautifully written narrative of male violence and the three women who endured it.”
—William Boyd, The Telegraph
“Wyld is unhesitatingly brave in her writing . . . Her delineation of the [post-war] era is cut-glass perfect . . . Her prose shines, even as it devours.”
—Catherine Taylor, Financial Times
“Powerful, intensely absorbing . . . There’s more than a hint of Fleabag about the dysfunctional relationship between Viv and her elder sister, and Wyld is as gifted as Phoebe Waller-Bridge at capturing the hilarious, the excruciating and the absurd.”
—Stephanie Cross, Daily Mail
“Ingenious . . . Bold . . . With each novel, Wyld gets better and better.”
—Stuart Kelly, The Scotsman
“Wyld’s gossamer-light prose, beautiful even in its depiction of murder, brings nuance and complexity to the story . . . Wyld’s skilfully woven narrative will keep you turning towards a final, unexpected twist.”
—Lucy Pavia, Evening Standard
“[The] build-up of dread is excellent . . . Most powerful of all is Wyld’s evocation of a hairs-on-the-neck sense of foreboding when women interact with volatile men.”
—Francesca Carington, Sunday Telegraph
“A spikily beautiful novel . . . Wyld underpins the whole with a seething anger. That this doesn’t overwhelm the novel is down to some skilful storytelling.”
—Siobhan Murphy, The Times
“Vivid and gripping.”
—John Self, Irish Times
“Powerfully done.”
—Emily Rhodes, The Spectator
About the Author
EVIE WYLD’s debut novel, After the Fire, a Still Small Voice, was short-listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and awarded the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Her second novel, All the Birds, Singing, won the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the Encore Award and the European Union Prize for Literature, and it was shortlisted for the Costa Book Award for Best Novel. In 2013 she was named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. She lives in London.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
I was six and just the two of us, my mother and I, took Booey for a walk along the beach where she and Dad grew up, the shore a mix of black rock and pale cold sand. It was always cold —even in summer we wore wool jumpers and our noses ran and became scorched with wiping on our sleeves. But this was November, and the wind made the dog walk close to us, her ears flat, her eyes squinted. I could see the top layer of sand skittering away, so that it looked like a giant bed sheet billowing.
We were looking for cowrie shells among the debris of the tideline. I had two digging into my palm, white like the throat of a herring gull. My mother had a keener eye and held six. I felt the pull of victory slackening.
Resting in a rock pool was a black suitcase, bulging at the sides. The zip had split and where the teeth no longer held together I saw two fingers tipped with red nails and one grey knuckle where a third finger should have been. The stump of the finger, like the miniature plaster ham I had from my dolls’ house. The colour had been sucked from the knuckle by seawater, leaving just a cool grey and the white of the bone. It was the bone, I suppose, that made it so much like the tiny ham. I moved my arm to swat something away from my face and, as I did, flies rose from the suitcase in a cloud, thick and heavy.
Behind me, my mother —“Another one!” she called. “I’ve found another one!” —and then the smell, like a dead cat in the chimney in summer, a smell so tall and so broad that you can’t see over or around it.
My mother walked up behind me.
“What’s . . .” I kept looking at the fingers and trying to understand, my mother pulling me by the arm. “Come away, come away,” she said, and spitting over and over on to the sand, “don’t look, come away.” But the more I looked the more I saw, and peeking through the gaps between the white fingers was an eye that seemed to look back at me, that seemed to know something about me and to ask a question and give an answer. In the memory, which is a child’s memory and unreliable, the eye blinks.
THE LAMB
I
The small supermarket in Musselburgh is open until 10 p.m. and the staff look offended by me as I walk in at 9:35. I imagine how I must appear after eight hours in the car. I splashed my face with water in a service station near Durham and my hair has dried strangely. I am unkempt enough to present as a shoplifter.
I have parked towards the back of the supermarket by the cash machines, to remind myself to get some on the way out because the shops nearer the house prefer not to accept cards.
I spend a long time at the herbs. There’s fresh ginger and the chillies and I wonder how I would go about making something with them. I put some lemon thyme in my trolley instead. Perhaps I will roast a chicken tomorrow. Or a couple of thighs. I’m not a good cook —I like thighs because when I forget them they don’t dry out.
I always overdo it on the fruit —but it’s hard not to feel excited. They have all different colours of plum from Kenya —yellow, orange, purple, red and black —and I put a carton of each in my trolley. That’s thirty plums for me to eat in a week, which is only a little over four a day and feels like something I could accomplish. Two in the morning, two at night. If I were the kind of person who could preserve things, I’d preserve a jar of each variety and just have them to look at. But they would grow a film of mould, like the time I made chilli olive oil and the bottle went black. I am missing some fundamental element of preservation. I suspect it’s cleanliness. I move on, and though I try to think of something new and interesting to cook, by the time I get to the frozen aisle, I have spaghetti, tinned tomatoes and tinned clams. A box of eggs I will never use and some sliced brown bread and the herbs. None of it I want to eat tonight. But it is at least food that suggests a certain seriousness. I am the sort of woman who is here to work. Who is doing her family a favour, not the other way round. I am no longer the person who failed every day last June to get out of bed before midday. Who stopped going to work and seeing her friends and answering the phone, and had to be driven by her sister to the hospital when the breath stopped coming in and going out, and who could only make one long lowing noise. I did not spend seven days in a room with no edges, with a sign on the door that said No Cutlery Whatsoever (including teaspoons!).
The tannoy announces that the store will be closing in five minutes and it feels a message to me in particular.
There is a woman in the frozen aisle, which I am only in because it marks the completion of my shopping trip. She has no trolley or basket even; she’s looking at the choc ices. She picks out a box of four expensive mint ones that have a woman’s mouth large and rude on the front cracking through the chocolate.
She has an unlit cigarette in her mouth, ready to go, big curly hair that has been teased and sprayed and she’s wearing pink lipstick. She smiles at me, and says, “Late-night ice cream?” and I feel so flustered I go red and then I laugh too loudly and just say, “Plums.” She smiles back and turns to leave. I’ll be hearing myself saying plums all night.
At the end of the frozen aisle is a display of Mr. Freeze’s Jubbly orange ice lollies. When we were kids, Dad, in his best moods, when he wanted nothing more than to make Katherine and me laugh, would sing a song from the advert that was on TV when he was young, lovely jubbly, lovely jubbly orange drink . Why that was the thing that made us laugh the most is hard to pinpoint, but I think it had more to do with him wanting us to laugh, than the song itself. Even so, I am standing still because, like so many small things discovered every day, I am faced with never hearing that song in his voice again. I have forgotten the fucking chicken thighs and so I speed back to the meat fridge and all the nice chicken is gone, there’s only the stuff that has had an awful life and tastes of fish. I put a tin of sardines in my trolley, put the herbs back on the shelf. Pre-sliced Swiss cheese, a bar of chocolate and some celery, just for show.
There is only one till left open, a small queue of us trying to project that shopping this late is not usual for us. I flick through a magazine. There’s a moody image of a man thumbing his upper lip to show off either his cufflinks or his watch. He wrinkles his forehead in a way that is supposed to be sexy. And then opposite him, a pale stick of a girl with hair parted down the middle, lips painted into a red bow, a puppet at rest. She stares off into the distance, sad. She’s there to be looked at by the man with the cufflinks and the wrinkled brow, but she is not there to look back.
My mother’s voice in my head —Why do all these women want to look like deer in the headlights? Why do all these men want to look like they laugh too loudly in public?
I am glad that the time spent thinking about how other people will respond or not respond to my body and face has passed. I’m older than my mother somehow because at least she participated in her life at my age —she had a husband and children and then lost part of that and now lives as it seems she always meant to, alone and with her work. She’s been working on poisonous fungi of France for nine months now. The only framed picture in my flat is one she gave me as a moving-in present three years ago, a fly agaric with a stag beetle meandering past it, for scale. It leans unhung in my bedroom. There is probably a house spider nestling behind it. My mother has found being alone a new beginning. Her house is tidy. She eats what she wants, when she wants: nothing for a day and then a dressed crab at eleven at night, or a bowl of frozen peas, uncooked, which she eats like peanuts for breakfast. I admire the singleness that she has embraced since Dad died. I think I could aspire to that, but without having to be widowed first.
