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After The Fire, A Still Small Voice (2009)

by Evie Wyld(Favorite Author)

3.59 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

0307378462 (ISBN13: 9780307378460)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Pantheon

review 1: Strange choice of subject matter for a first time young female novelist. Evie Wyld has chosen to write a novel about male worlds as rudimentary and imminently violent as the landscapes in which her novel is set. Clearly a choice that took her way outside all her comfort zones. I’m not convinced it was the right choice as, for me, she never quite appeared in command of her characters or her story. The story alternates between a father and a son. Except the father is always shown younger than the son, which is interesting. However it’s as if the father begins to elude Wyld half way through the novel and his sections become shorter and shorter and the architecture becomes increasingly uneven when Leon is sent to Vietnam. Vietnam isn’t convincing. Nor is the defining ani... moremosity the son appears to feel for the father. In fact often her characterisation of males seems a bit stereotypical and simplistic. What she can do however is write incredibly well. My favourite character was Sal, a female waif and child of nature and my favourite sections of the book are when Leon is making his cakes. Wyld’s insightful sensitivity to sensibility shines through here, making it even more odd that she chooses to almost exclusively focus on characters who largely shun sensibility. After the Fire is more of a promising novel than an exciting or satisfying one. But there’s enough brilliance here to make me want to read her next novel.
review 2: I enjoyed this book, but it never rose to great heights for me. Sometimes I found the author's desire to be poetic confused and disjointed the story. I also found it hard to connect with the characters and at times there were too many on the periphery of the story that seemed to make little, if any, contribution to the overall story. I decided when I finished this book, that as much as I like good writing, I much prefer a book that had a gripping and well structured plot, rather than one that replies on "poetry" to make a point. This book left too much unexplained, had a lot of irrelevant detail and failed to connect a lot of the characters and events with the main theme. In fact, at times I even struggled to work out what the main theme might have been! I'm not sorry I invested time to read it, but it was a bit of a chore to finish. less

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