Women -- Fiction. |
Interpersonal relations -- Fiction. |
Man-woman relationships -- Fiction |
Survival -- Fiction. |
Historical fiction. |
Human females |
Wimmin |
Woman |
Womon |
Womyn |
Human relations |
Interpersonal relationships |
Personal relations |
Relations, Interpersonal |
Relationships, Interpersonal |
Social behavior |
Survival after airplane accidents, shipwrecks, etc. |
Survival skills |
Available:
Library | Shelf Number | Shelf Location | Status |
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Searching... Foxboro - Boyden Library | FIC WYLD | FICTION | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Pembroke Public Library | FIC WYLD, E. | FICTION | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Taunton Public Library | WYLD, EVIE | 1ST FLOOR STACKS | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
WINNER OF THE STELLA PRIZE
The lives of three women weave together across centuries in this dazzling new novel.
Sarah, accused of being a witch, is fleeing for her life.
Ruth, in the aftermath of World War II, is navigating a new marriage and the strange waters of the local community.
Six decades later, Viv, still mourning the death of her father, is cataloging Ruth's belongings in Ruth's now-empty house.
As each woman's story unfolds, it becomes increasingly clear that their choices are circumscribed, in ways big and small, by the men who seek to control them. But in sisterhood there is also the possibility of survival and a new way of life. Intricately crafted and compulsively readable, The Bass Rock burns bright with love and fury--a devastating indictment of violence against women and an empowering portrait of their resilience through the ages.
Reviews (4)
Guardian Review
In her award-winning first two novels, 2009's After the Fire, A Still Small Voice and 2013's All the Birds Singing, Anglo-Australian author Evie Wyld wrote with intensity and precision about toxic masculinity and emotional damage. The past was always snapping at the heels of her characters, coming to hunt them down. Seven years on, her new novel is a complex, searingly controlled catalogue of male violence against women, set across three time frames on the coast of Scotland and named after a tiny uninhabited island at the entrance to the Firth of Forth that rears precipitiously out of the waves. The Bass Rock is a looming presence across the years as the narrative opens with Viviane, who is up from London to sort through the family house before it is sold. We then travel back to the aftermath of the second world war, when Ruth first moves into the house with her widowed husband, Peter, and his young sons; and back further still to the 1700s, when Sarah, a teenager accused of being a witch, is running for her life. The book is divided into several parts, each stepping from Viviane to Ruth to Sarah and then forwards again, and closing with a passage in which an anonymous woman is attacked; whether the victim is set upon in ancient forest or battered with a modern golf club, male violence remains a constant across the centuries. The elegant patterning of the novel's structure and the delicate links between the three narrative threads stand in contrast to the brutal material. It is, inevitably, a furious and painful reading experience: by page 10 alone, we've encountered a woman's dismembered body in a suitcase, a disquisition on misogynistic advertising and a threatening stranger in a car park. But the novel is also psychologically fearless and, in Viviane's sections, bitterly funny. Wyld is a genius of contrasting voices and revealed connections, while her foreshadowings are so subtle that the book demands - and eminently repays - a second read. Both Ruth and Viviane are in mourning for good men; Ruth for a brother who died in the war, Viviane for her father, the youngest of Ruth's stepsons. Both have had breakdowns and been hospitalised: Ruth in a genteel sanatorium, Viviane in "a room with no edges, with a sign on the door that said No Cutlery Whatsoever (including teaspoons!)". Ruth aims to be a good mother to Peter's boys, waits for a child of her own and with the aid of a daytime whisky or three tries to fit herself to the demands of husband and community: that stay in the sanatorium, after all, had "taught her a bit about pretending". Whenever she is less than compliant, Peter treats her to an object lesson in gaslighting. "I'm worried, quite frankly. Are you feeling unwell?" Meanwhile Viviane, depressed and drifting at nearly 40, takes a perverse satisfaction in embracing her darkness: scratching at her eczema wounds, pouring yet another drink. Both women are in awe of more competent sisters; Viviane has a Fleabag-style relationship with Katherine, whose husband Dom has turned out to be another violent, unstable man. Sarah's story, meanwhile, is halting and impressionistic; narrated by a young man who wants both to save and possess her, it lacks the intimate, closely textured insight of the other sections. Her modern-day equivalent is the witchy, manic Maggie, who channels the spirits of the past and rants about male violence. "She sounds mad," thinks Viviane - and she does, as women giving voice to the unspeakable often do. There are many more characters and connections in this dense, complicated book, which is a gothic novel, a family saga and a ghost story rolled into one, as well as a sustained shout of anger. It's not only the women who fear predators: after the horrors of the boarding school intended to make them "bolder, stronger, more resilient", Ruth's stepsons often feel the approach of the "Wolfman" at their heels. Wolves and foxes form part of the novel's symbolic patterning, as well as its classification of men. "What is he? A wolf or a fox?" asks Maggie of Vincent, the man Viviane is cautiously dating. The tattoo he shows her on their first meeting, when he accosts her in a shop with blithe entitlement, is meant to be a wolf, he says, "but the tattooist ended up making it look more like a Jack Russell". Meanwhile the monstrous vicar in Ruth's sections, a horribly vivid creation, is unquestionably lupine. The fatal "tickling" of a witch in the 18th-century metamorphoses into a nasty bit of horseplay at a communal picnic in Ruth's timeline and then an uneasy episode between Vincent and Viviane. "Fuck, you want me to apologise to you because after fucking you, I tickled you? Jesus Christ, I'm so sorry." Perhaps Vincent is another wolfman, after all; perhaps it's easier not to find out. There is a scene in a train station when the vengeful Dom rushes towards Viviane and Katherine, ready to unleash his anger and frustration on them. Why don't they shout, run, hide, pull the emergency cord when they know that they're in danger? Why do they just wait quietly in their seats as he gets closer? "We waited, just in case we were wrong."
Kirkus Review
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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
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.
Library Journal Review
A multihonored Granta Best of Young British Novelists, Wyld follows up All the Birds Singing with the interwoven stories of three women stunted by male prerogative: accused witch Sarah, who's running for her life; Ruth, adapting to marriage and a new community post-World War II; and Viv, mourning her father as she catalogs the possessions in Ruth's abandoned house. All these stories are grounded by a huge rock formation on Scotland's coast.