You could hardly say that All the Birds, Singing lures you in under false pretences. From the first line – "Another sheep, mangled and bled out, her innards not yet crusting and the vapours rising from her like a steamed pudding" – it is a tale that oozes, drips, throbs with menace. A sign at a farm shop offering "Free baby guinea pigs" is out of date: the teenage girl behind the counter has given them to her brother to feed to his snake. Soon afterwards, our female protagonist, Jake Whyte, through whose eyes these scenes are described, finds a pigeon with a damaged wing. She calls the number on its tag, receives instructions on how to nurse the bird back to health, but as she talks she accidently crushes it in her hands and kills it.
"Stupid to think it wouldn't all fall to shit," Jake notes, early on, setting the tone.
Jake lives alone on a creepy, unnamed island off the coast of Britain, tending 50 sheep with her dog, Dog. Well, it's more like 48 sheep now as someone or something is gruesomely picking them off at night. Whyte suspects local kids, but accepts that it could also be a fox or a more shadowy creature that is said to lurk in the woods. But All the Birds, Singing is not a ruminant whodunnit exactly; it is a thoughtful and intense account of a young woman seemingly determined to disappear from the world's radar.
The chapters on the island are interspersed with episodes from Jake's earlier life in Australia. While the British sections progress as a straightforward narrative, the scenes in Australia unfold in reverse, from adult life back to childhood. We meet her on a sheep station in the outback, where she works as a shearer.
She is strong and hard-working and receives the highest accolade from her male colleagues of being "a good bloody bloke". Jake has a past – "We've all got a past," one of the shearers tells her – and slowly it is revealed why she might have chosen to move to the other side of the world.
It's an inventive and occasionally discombobulating way of telling a story, but anyone who has read Wyld's debut, After the Fire, a Still Small Voice, will not be surprised. That book ingeniously melded the lives of two men from different generations – again in alternate chapters – through the drama of a missing girl and a foray into the Vietnam war. After the Fire won Wyld a clutch of awards and earlier this year she was selected for Granta's list of best British novelists under the age of 40.
All the Birds, Singing should enhance her reputation as one of our most gifted novelists. Her pacing is impeccable and the trickle of information she marshals lends tension and compassion to Jake's troubled, solitary existence. How did she get those scars on her back? What could have happened to her in Australia that makes standing in a field, the wind whipping sheep dung in her face, preferable?
This is not a bleak book, though it has its moments. Wyld knows when to pull back; among the predatory folk Jake encounters, there are displays of kindness, humour and affection, notably from a shearer called Greg and from a stranger, Lloyd, who appears on the island one day. After they have spent some time together, Lloyd asks Jake: "So… I suppose you're wondering what I'm doing up here?" Jake doesn't answer and Lloyd doesn't tell. Wyld will reveal all only when she's good and ready.
