Zoya Patel 

Echolalia by Briohny Doyle – a dark, deft and gripping read about mania and motherhood

Set against the backdrop of a town in crisis, Doyle’s novel swirls in sinister imagery and anxiety before a horrendous act that blows a family apart
  
  

Author Briohny Doyle and her new book Echolalia
The novel Echolalia ‘feels like a natural next book’ for Briohny Doyle. Composite: Penguin Random House

In a country town on the outskirts of the city, a lake is drying up, slowly receding to a puddle. From the glazed windows of her mansion, a young woman watches the landmark shrivel, while inside the house her own world is also shrinking to the rhythms of her baby boy.

It is this foreboding world that author Briohny Doyle invites us into in her second novel, Echolalia. Cleverly named, the book does indeed feel like a mounting repetition of images and actions that ultimately lead to tragedy.

The novel centres on Emma: a promising young woman on the brink of the perfect life – married to a wealthy and charismatic man, and handed a newly-built mansion in the fanciest part of town, she soon becomes pregnant with her first child, her daughter Clem.

Emma’s husband, Robert, has inherited a property development kingdom that has reinvented the small town of Shorehaven over the course of generations and, like his father before him, he wants a son to pass down the business to.

But after their second child, a boy, is revealed to be neuro-atypical – and the condition is traced back to Emma’s side of the family – she is placed in a cycle of atonement to Robert and his parents for delivering an imperfect heir.

She falls pregnant again, immediately after Arthur is born, and delivers another baby boy: neuro-typical Robbie, with thick strong legs; Robbie, repeatedly referred to by his father as “the king of the castle”.

Emma is briefly redeemed by her family but her psychological state unravels: obsessed with the sexual degradation she experienced as a teenager, her anxiety and fear culminates in a protective paranoia focused on Arthur – and a gradually accelerating fear of the newborn Robbie, who she becomes convinced is controlling and abusing her.

Robert’s clear favouritism of their youngest child is coupled with a growing condescension towards his wife’s unstable state – and his judgmental and impatient mother Pat becomes less and less empathetic the further Emma falls into postnatal depression and mania.

The novel is split into two narratives being told in tandem but labelled as “before” and “after”. In the after, an unnamed woman is atoning for a horrendous act that blows her family apart.

Echolalia feels like a natural next book from Doyle, who’s previous books include the dystopic climate novel The Island Will Sink and a non-fiction work, Adult Fantasy, about the outdated expectations of adulthood – marriage, home-ownership, children – that burden her generation. Echolalia weaves in both themes of climate disaster and the bitter reality of adult life, bringing them together to present a gripping exploration of gender, families, ethics and identity.

This central narrative is set against the backdrop of a town in crisis. The city sprawl continues to encroach on Shorehaven, even as the opportunities for development dwindle. Sinister events begin to occur: a local landmark pub goes up in flames just days after Robert’s company attempts to purchase it from the reluctant owner; and meanwhile, the lake is drying up – just like the promise of the corroding town around it.

It’s in this context that Emma’s anxiety and fear grows, culminating in a paranoia focussed on Arthur. And when tragedy occurs, it’s clear that no one will escape unscathed.

Doyle doesn’t just build the book to this crescendo, though. Without dislocating the reader, she deftly takes us straight into the aftermath, skipping forward in time to reveal the impacts of the catastrophe on the family, and the impacts of development and corruption on the town more than a decade later. Her ability to weave together the perspectives of three generations is impressive; it’s possible to forget that this is a second novel, and not the work of an author with decades’ of work behind them.

The writing is rich with motif, with seemingly innocuous images becoming darkly relevant as the story is revealed. Pat’s new horse, for instance – purchased as a birthday present to herself, and brimming with youth and promise – returns decades later as a decrepit and aged animal limping through its final days, much like the family reckoning with the decaying town they built. Likewise a beach in Indonesia – tumultuous and stormy – becomes the scene of a reckoning between two middle-aged cousins, forced to atone for their sins in an ocean as violent as their anger.

These are scenes that stay with the reader for weeks, with layers of meaning that keep turning over and revealing themselves after reading.

Echolalia is a highly accomplished novel from a writer who is swiftly proving herself to be a key force in our literary landscape.

• Echolalia by Briohny Doyle is out now through Penguin Random House

 

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