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    After the Fire, A Still Small Voice
    Unavailable
    After the Fire, A Still Small Voice
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    After the Fire, A Still Small Voice
    Audiobook10 hours

    After the Fire, A Still Small Voice

    Written by Evie Wyld

    Narrated by David Tredinnick

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    Frank and Leon are two men from different times, discovering that sometimes all you learn from your parents' mistakes is how to make different ones of your own.

    Frank is trying to escape his troubled past by running away to his family's beach shack. As he struggles to make friends with his neighbors and their precocious young daughter, Sal, he discovers the community has fresh wounds of its own. A girl is missing, and when Sal too disappears, suspicion falls on Frank.

    Decades earlier, Leon tries to hold together his family's cake shop as their suburban life crumbles in the aftermath of the Korean War. When war breaks out again, Leon must go from sculpting sugar figurines to killing young men as a conscript in the Vietnam War.

    ©2009 Evie Wyld (P)2012 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd, published in the UK by Random House Audiobooks

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRandom House UK Audio
    Release dateDec 6, 2012
    ISBN9781448156641
    Unavailable
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    Reviews for After the Fire, A Still Small Voice

    3.5/5

    76 ratings15 reviews

    What did you think?

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    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      A great book, although Wyld's second certainly improves on the formula. Its focus is a pretty buzzworthy topic at the moment - the emotional turmoil of silent men - but it throws up wider questions too. Can people change? Is closure always good, or even necessary? An easy recommendation, along with its follow-up.
    • 4/5
      This is not an easy book to write about or a comfortable read, but it is an impressive debut novel. The story alternates between the modern part, which follows Frank as he moves to his grandparents abandoned beach house to regroup after an abusive relationship, but gets caught up in local problems. The other part follows Frank's father Leon, first coming to terms with his own father's traumatic experiences of the Korean war and then as a conscript in Vietnam. These family stories are mixed with atmospheric descriptions of wild Australia, and the overall tone is a mixture of the reflective, the claustrophobic and the slightly menacing
    • 2/5
      Grim. Dull. Couldn't finish it.
    • 2/5
      As my two star rating reflects I thought this was "just ok". Obviously I'm in the minority, so it's more a matter of it just not being my kind of book.
    • 5/5
      Evie Wyld's novel involves the stories of two Australian men, Frank and Leon. They are both taciturn and morbidly shy but both are continually introspective and have good personal insight. The two characters know they have a drive toward aggression fueled by usually repressed rage. They also have a drive toward love fueled by a strong sexual drive and a genuine caring for women. The rage breaks through in Frank and Leon overpowering their love and caring. The rage can be channeled with combat in Leon, who controls wartime release with post war alcohol and isolation. Frank uses alcohol and isolation too, but is a bit rougher around the edges than Leon. Wyld alternates the narrative from one character to the other showing parallels and important differences. The story reveals the relationship between the two slowly and with great psychological suspense. The tone, style, and content remind me of Patrick Hamilton's very good novel, Hangover Square (see my review). I thoroughly enjoyed After the Fire, a still Small Voice. The reader can expect a good description of rural Australian flora and fauna and a bit of big city expansion. The two narrator voices are quite dissimilar in the beginning, but watch for increasing parallels as the plot progresses. This is a great novel with a wide historical scope, from Korea to Vietnam and wild rural consistency to controlled urban change.
    • 3/5
      Interesting and nicely written, but I would have liked knowing earlier how the threads were woven. Possibly a density on my part.
    • 5/5
      Evie Wyld's novel involves the stories of two Australian men, Frank and Leon. They are both taciturn and morbidly shy but both are continually introspective and have good personal insight. The two characters know they have a drive toward aggression fueled by usually repressed rage. They also have a drive toward love fueled by a strong sexual drive and a genuine caring for women. The rage breaks through in Frank and Leon overpowering their love and caring. The rage can be channeled with combat in Leon, who controls wartime release with post war alcohol and isolation. Frank uses alcohol and isolation too, but is a bit rougher around the edges than Leon. Wyld alternates the narrative from one character to the other showing parallels and important differences. The story reveals the relationship between the two slowly and with great psychological suspense. The tone, style, and content remind me of Patrick Hamilton's very good novel, Hangover Square (see my review). I thoroughly enjoyed After the Fire, a still Small Voice. The reader can expect a good description of rural Australian flora and fauna and a bit of big city expansion. The two narrator voices are quite dissimilar in the beginning, but watch for increasing parallels as the plot progresses. This is a great novel with a wide historical scope, from Korea to Vietnam and wild rural consistency to controlled urban change.
    • 1/5
      Another reading group book bites the dust. I got really bored really quickly. It is not my sort of novel anyway and at about page 90 I gave up. Nope - not for me.
    • 4/5
      The highlight of this book for me is the descriptive prose. Evie Wyld has a real talent for using fresh language and images, and it shines through from the first page to the last. The story is about traumatised men who bottle up their emotions and fail to communicate, and it's well told, as we alternate between rageful Frank in the present day and his father Leon growing up and going through the Vietnam War. Much of the force that drives the novel on is discovering the reasons for Frank's anger and particularly for his hatred of his father, but this is never really resolved satisfactorily. It's consistent with the characters that nothing really gets openly expressed, but it left me feeling a bit disappointed at the end.I'd still recommend this book for the luminous prose and the deft handling of compelling themes, but just don't expect all the strands to be pulled together perfectly.
    • 3/5
      How awful it must be to be heterosexual...to know, with the full force of society's blasting, trumpeting inculcation of knowledge that your Object of Desire will not, can not, indeed may not, ever make sense to you.Evie Wyld presents the stories of three generations of miserable men and the women they screw up in this, her debut novel. Lady's got guts, let's hand her her just props...she writes of the horrors of war as experienced by these men with the assurance of a far more mature (in experiential terms) writer. She fails signally to give these three generations of men any distinguishing characteristics. She tells the tale through the eyes of two of the three men, in (for no apparent aesthetic or organizational reason) alternating chapters.She writes well when we're considering lines (plenty of examples, just open the book anywhere and you'll hit a good 'un); but why did Evie Wyld tell this particular story? I don't know. And that, ladies and gents, is a problem.So am I supposed to think she's brave, for writing about men, or am I supposed to think she's sensitive, for understanding them? I don't think she's brave because she's created one man, a miserable loser with no delusions as to his own adequacy still less superiority; a character who, no matter which name-label she slaps on him, doesn't grow, change, or even demonstrate more than lizard-brain function. I don't think she's sensitive because each and every man she limns is a shit of the first water, abusive of or vampiring off the women in the book.I'm really, really sick of women portraying men in this light, and then having other women yodel their praises for doing this eternal, socially acceptable hatchet job on men. This book, for reasons I can't understand, is a longlister for the Orange Prize. She's got promise, I grant you, and she's got some native *thing* that makes her place evocations arm-hair-pricklingly good. But this isn't a book I will ever read again, and I don't recommend it.
    • 5/5
      Frank has returned to his childhood playground, a beach cottage near Queensland, to sort out his life after a devastating breakup, a relationship that inevitably ended when he became physically violent with his girlfriend. He loathes what he did, and runs to hide in a place that he thinks will comfort him. Once there, memories begin to eat at him, becoming so real that he turns his head and alerts to their arrival.He can’t relate to his new violent streak, and tries to analyze what has happened since his mother’s death that turned him. Violence would have been more appropriate, more expected, from his father or even his grandfather, both veterans of brutal warfare in Asia. As the novel continues, the narration explores the experiences of both of those men in war and at home.It’s oversimplified to say that war changed them, and Wyld doesn’t take us down that well-worn path. Rather, what makes this story complex is how it changed everyone else. Wives and girlfriends alternate between comforters and enemies, their every action subject to the random and unpredictable moods of their men.“ Some fellas, they make the women lonely. Maybe it doesn’t apply to you, mate, but maybe that’s why you’re here”Frank sorts through his memories while being befriended by a small girl and her pet carrot. A missing teenager and a grieving couple complicate his life while his coworkers rail against the Aboriginal natives that reside in the community. All the while his memories and fears creep up on him though he tries to ignore them. At one point, he makes a conscious decision to rid himself of tangible items to remove the memories that go with them:“Makes things easier having less stuff. See, if I keep them I’ve got to find a place to put them in – probably in a box or something so they don’t get broken…And when you start to get older that sort of thing gets to be more of a problem.”This novel focuses on the intimate details of these men and their lives in a setting of urbanization and change. Wyld describes subtle gestures and inner thoughts flawlessly, and invents these entirely new flawed characters like none I’ve read before. Her writing style reminds me of Tim Winton (my favorite author), with its focus on the Australian bush and seaside with their colors and plants and weather. An unexpected sweetness is found mixed in with the brutality of war. A really enjoyable story that makes me eager for her next book.
    • 4/5
      Evie Wyld's terrifically self-assured debut, set mostly on the coast of Queensland, uses its biblical title to describe the turbulent lives of three estranged men - Frank, his father Leon, and grandfather Roman. Frank is a washed-up failure. Abruptly leaving his girlfriend in Sydney, he hotfoots it to his dead grandparents' deserted shack. There he confronts his memories of shortlived happiness and grudgingly accepts the friendship of the locals. Leon grew up as the only child of European immigrant parents. His father, an exquisitely talented baker, volunteered for the Korean war out of dogged loyalty to his adopted country, a trauma which ripped the small family apart. Leon's assumption of Roman's trade is in turn interrupted by his own horrific experiences in Vietnam. It's a cauterising, cleansing tale, told with muscular writing.
    • 4/5
      Set in Australia and examining the lives of three generations of the same family, this is an engaging novel. The story mainly switches between Frank and Leon, both men adrift. Leon, the father, served during the Vietnam war and witnessed suffering and atrocities he cannot forget, later he loses his wife and descends into alcoholism, neglecting his son, Frank. Frank estranged from his father, has left his girlfriend Lucy after giving her the bash once too often. Frank ends up living in his grandparent’s abandoned shack and going bush as he tries to make sense of his anger and misdirection. There he gets involved in a missing child investigation and briefly becomes a suspect.This novel offers no neat solutions to the difficulties of these men’s lives. The pace picks up a little artificially towards the end as if trying to inject a little more tangible storyline into the novel which in the main has been told through flashbacks and inner musings.Well worth a read.
    • 4/5
      I was thoroughly engrossed in this novel. Set in Australia, it chronicles three generations of a family. The novel begins with the end of the protagonist, Frank's, relationship with Lucy. As Frank makes his way to the family shack on the beach to try to sort things through, the novel begins to move back and forth in time between Frank, his father, and his grandfather.This is a multifaceted novel with several compelling themes. The first is the generational patterns of war, loss, and separation and how these impinge on Frank. Another is the mystery of the setting in which Frank finds himself: spooky happenings abound, including the disappearance of a local girl and the presence of an unidentified "Creeping Jesus" near Frank's shack that is heard but never seen. Frank intends to eliminate traces of his family from the shack but finds that you can't hide from the past.Wyld's prose is magical. The novel has a smooth rhythm throughout. The plot doesn't wrap up as nicely as some might like, but this is a novel that's more about the journey than the destination. Frank's rustic shack and the wildness of the bush come to life and the setting becomes a character in and of itself. I look forward to more from this author.
    • 4/5
      Set in Australia, this story of fathers and sons, of war and of history seemingly doomed to repeat itself follows two narrative strands: that of Frank, set in present-day Canberra, and Leon, set in Sydney and Vietnam in the 1960s. Frank and Leon both have difficult relationships with their fathers. Frank's total rejection of his father has directly influenced the break-up of his relationship; after his girlfriend Lucy tries one too many times to persuade him to get back in touch, his violent behaviour drives her out, and ends with him reclaiming his grandparents' shack in Canberra as he tries to put his life back together. 40 years or so earlier, Leon is dealing with the difficulties inherent in being an immigrant when his father enlists to fight in Korea, an experience that affects him profoundly, and ultimately breaks up Leon's family. When Leon is conscripted to fight in Vietnam, he sends his estranged mother a brief postcard announcing his absence, locks up the shop and leaves nothing behind.Unusually for a book about war, this is quiet and thoughtful: as the title has it, the "still small voice" rather than the fire. The connections between the two narratives are subtly done and not overstressed, and the theme of forgiveness in the face of horrors nicely explored. Wyld also captures the savage beauty of the beach and bush landscape of Australia in a wonderfully evocative manner, and is similarly effective in some of the passages about Leon's experiences in Vietnam. The main issue for me was I connected much more with Leon's strand of the narrative, and just couldn't care much about Frank until I was nearly 3/4 of the way through. If the themes of war and filial relationships are of interest, though, you may well get a lot out of this.