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. ( )

In Evie Wyld’s debut novel, Frank Collard, often consumed with fits of uncontrollable rage, flees from a broken relationship to a remote cabin on an isolated stretch of coast in Queensland, Australia. The cabin, a lonely place of inherited anguish, is the same one his grandparents inhabited after fleeing their own inner demons years before. In a parallel story line, Leon is forced to take responsibility for the family bakery in Sydney when his father returns from the Korean War unable to cope with the business. In time, Leon is drafted for the Vietnam War and forced to endure the horrors from which his father never recovered. Eventually, Frank’s and Leon’s stories come together, resonating with their shared themes of trauma and the succeeding attempts to heal.

After the Fire, a Still Small Voice is a quiet character study of those on the fringes of society, those struggling to replace pain with a livable kind of contentment. This human drama plays out in the richly described landscape of the Australian coast. It’s a place at once welcoming and threatening, filled with its own secret pleasures and ominous mysteries. In addition to the setting, Wyld takes time to craft realistic layers of complexity in her characters. In one scene, Frank and his neighbor have a meandering conversation over several beers and many hours while the late afternoon sky slowly darkens into night. It’s an evocative and acutely realistic scene, but when combined with similar scenes, the book exhibits a lethargy that becomes sluggish in places.

Wyld exercises admirable restraint throughout and refuses to resolve the novel in expected or conventional ways. The lack of closure is beautiful and appropriately tormented but also frustrating, particularly given the novel’s overall aimlessness. After the Fire, a Still Small Voice is a masterful portrayal of human resilience but suffers from an occasional lack of momentum and direction.

This review also appears on my blog Literary License. ( )

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. ( )