After the Fire, a Still Small Voice, Evie Wyld
Jonathan Cape, 296pp, £16.99
Evie Wyld takes the title of her debut novel from a chapter in the Old Testament Book of Kings, in which the prophet Elijah, alone and vulnerable, flees a furious Queen Jezebel. Wyld's two protagonists are also in flight from women: Frank from a girlfriend in modern-day Canberra, Leon from his mother as he goes to fight in Vietnam.
The two men's stories overrun each other as Wyld sympathetically explores the blight of war and violence on three generations of a working-class Australian family. While Leon comes to terms with a lonely adolescence away from his shell-shocked father, Frank must recover from his own brutality in a rural shack, far from his old life in the city. When Leon leaves his broken suburban life to fight in Vietnam, the cycle of violence continues, his horrendous experiences ruining his relationship with his own son. Both Leon and Frank long to return to civilised normality but cannot escape their own aggression, or the repercussions of their experiences, and their stories gradually merge in a sad and inconclusive climax.~
Gabriel Byng
The Einstein Girl, Philip Sington
Harvill Secker, 400pp, £12.99
“People think that Albert Einstein's work is all about distant stars and galaxies," a character says towards the end of Philip Sington's second solo novel. "They don't think it's anything to do with them." Sington tries to counter this by having his characters' chaotic emotional lives embody the basic concepts of Einstein's theory of relativity.
The discovery of a comatose young woman in a German woodland in 1932 leads the psychiatrist Martin Kirsch into the shadows of Einstein's family life to help his patient piece together her broken memory. But the concept proves unwieldy, and Sington ends up turning a little-known area of Einstein's life into a soap opera. You could almost forgive this if the narrative had any urgency, but it doesn't get going until chapter 42.This is an interesting enough look at the Nazis' "cleansing" of psychiatric patients in the 1930s, but Sington's powers of invention don't live up to the intrinsic interest of his material.
Tom Lewis
