Books of the year
The Bass Rock by Evie Wyld review – a fearless vision of toxic masculinity
Sat 21 Mar 2020 07.30 GMT
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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.”
• The Bass Rock is published by Jonathan Cape (RRP £16.99).
THE GUARDIAN
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