All the Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld

First published in Great Britain in 2013; published by Pantheon on April 15, 2014

At the start of All the Birds, Singing we know little about Jake Whyte. We know that Jake is a woman of a certain age who speaks with an Australian accent, that she lives alone on a small island in Great Britain, that someone has sliced open and gutted two of her sheep, and that she feels like she's being watched. The novel changes its time frame repeatedly and we soon learn that this is one of three eras in Jake's life that the novel will spotlight. In the second she is part of a sheep shearing team. In the third she is a companion/helper for a creepy sheep farmer named Otto. On the island she tends her own sheep and a strange man named Lloyd drifts into her life. Occasionally we are given glimpses of Jake's difficult childhood but the important event of Jake's formative years is saved for the final chapters.

The story jumps from one stage of Jake's life to another and for much of the novel it is difficult to place the chapters in sequence. At an early point, it is clear that Jake has joined the sheep shearing team to hide from her past, but only later do we learn why she is hiding. The novel's structure forces the reader to engage in mental gymnastics by reordering the chapters to make sense of the story, a technique that helps the reader understand how the components of Jake's life fit together while building suspense. It is clear that at least two stages of Jake's life will end with an eventful climax. The story of one stage works backwards from the climax while the other two move toward it. Again, the novel's unusual and somewhat challenging structure -- it is impossible to understand the story without reading to the end -- contribute to its interest.

The kind of person Jake is, the hard choices she has made (or not made) in her life, are revealed in increments as the story unfolds. The reader has a very different understanding of Jake by the novel's end. Evie Wyld made me feel sympathy for a number of characters who are not particularly sympathetic and a good bit of compassion for Jake, who is not necessarily a bad person but not particularly likable. In the end, it isn't necessary to like Jake to understand the forces that shaped her and to appreciate her pain.

On the other hand, the key formative event in Jake's adolescence, revealed late in the novel, is undeveloped in relation to the details we learn about more recent stages of Jake's life. Her motivation for acting as she does is unconvincing, largely because we know Jake well as an adult but little effort is made to make the reader understand her in her youth. The incident's sketchy presentation at the novel's end deprives it of its power and the reinterpretation of the novel's events that it inspires seems forced. The abrupt and ambiguous and downright strange ending also makes the story feel unfinished. Despite my qualms about the novel's ending, I enjoyed the story's intensity, its air of atmospheric mystery, and its portrait of a damaged human being trying to make the best of a difficult life.

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