The Bass Rock

July 1, 2020
Three women throughout history find themselves unknowingly connected through the violence enacted against them. Steeped in grief and teeming with ghosts, Wyld's new novel explores violence against women throughout time. The book is organized into seven sections that contain three points of view: those of Viviane, Ruth, and Sarah, who all lived near the titular Bass Rock, off the coast of Scotland. In the present day, Viviane is aimless, depressed, and on the verge of 40. Still grieving the death of her father, she finds herself having to get her grandmother's ghost-filled house ready to be sold. In the years after World War II, Ruth--Viviane's grandmother--is newly married, struggling to conceive, and caring for her husband's children from his late wife. In the early 1700s, a young woman named Sarah, an accused witch, flees with a local family that has vowed to save her. With a restrained (but sustained) rage, Wyld explores the physical violence, emotional abuse, misogyny, and other harder to define aggressions women experience at the hands of men. The novel's ambitious structure--which falters a bit during interspersed thematic vignettes--offers a kaleidoscopic portrayal of women's suffering; certain themes, visuals, and feelings echo throughout the generations, which creates a sense of collective trauma. Wyld is particularly adept at describing the physical anticipation of danger; a sense of foreboding hangs over the novel like a shroud. At one point, while describing the realities of being a woman, Viviane's friend Maggie says: "You know how sometimes you can smell it on a man, sometimes you just know--if he got you alone, if he had a rock....you know that thing when you feel it? Like your blood knows it." Time and time again, Wyld artfully proves the female body knows (even if the mind won't accept) the dangers lurking all around. A haunting survival tale that lingers long after the last page.

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September 1, 2020
In the mid-twentieth century, Ruth tries to settle into "the big house" in a Scottish village with her new husband and his two young sons, contending with the pristine image of her husband's late wife and the bizarre, controlling local reverend, who appears everywhere. Two generations later, in the present, fortysomething Viv sorts through Ruth's affairs in the now-empty home. Aimless and struggling, Viv meets a surprising new friend and invites her to stay in the damp, old house. A lesser, longer-ago story line involves a young woman taken in by a grief-stricken family after being badly beaten and accused of being a witch. It's hard to tell where Wyld's (All the Birds, Singing, 2014) atmospheric, gothic-laced story is heading?and hard to stop reading. Each in her world, the women sense ghostly presences, rotten smells, foreboding nature, and other reminders of their impermanence. Overlapping and echoing, their stories demonstrate the ways women are hemmed in and harmed by the whims of men, as well as the deep recesses of strength and imagination required to transcend them.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

October 9, 2020

In a small town off the coast of Edinburgh, a bloated suitcase containing a severed woman's hand washes up on shore. This woman's dark fate is not the main event but one of several stories about badly treated women. The women at the center of this tale are Viviane and Ruth, generations apart, both prone to depression and a fondness for alcohol. Viviane, rootless and underemployed, is hired by her uncle to clear out and ready for sale the large home that had belonged to his stepmother, Ruth, who had arrived as his father's new bride soon after the end of World War II. There was no joy in this big house. With her stepsons off to boarding school, Ruth suffered two miscarriages and then discovered her beastly husband's affair with a younger woman. VERDICT A Granta Best of Young British Novelists, Wyld (All the Birds, Singing) has proved herself in the past, but there's a patchiness to the multiple strands of her current work, as past and present mix with vignettes about ghosts, rape and murder. In the end, the parts of this chilling novel--particularly the "Masterpiece Theatre" paced postwar story--are stronger than the whole.--Barbara Love, formerly with Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont.

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